Mitch Albom — a bestselling author, radio host, and marquee newspaper columnist with the Detroit Free Press — may be in danger of losing his job with the Freep. Albom penned a column that included a reference to two men that attended a game during college basketball’s Final Four tournament. He even described what they were wearing at the game. Albom wrote the story as if they had been there — even though the story was filed before the game took place. In the end nether man ended up attending the game.
Albom has been temporarily suspended while the paper investigates this error and looks into some of his previous columns.Albom’s column is syndicated and his syndicate, Tribune Media Services, is offering up other content to fill the empty space. Editor & Publisher has been following the story and has an interesting piece in which it asks prominent editors if Albom deserves to be fired. Most say no.
Here’s the note to readers from Freep editor and publisher
Carole Leigh Hutton:
Dear readers,
As a newspaper, our credibility is paramount.
On Thursday, we reported that a Mitch Albom column in Sunday’s editions
misled readers by saying that two ex-Michigan State basketball players
were at Saturday night’s Final Four game.
They were not. The column was written Friday, for a section that was printed before the game was played.
Albom was wrong to report that the athletes were there when the game
had not yet been played. And the Free Press was wrong to publish it.
Albom has built an unparalleled reputation in 20 years as a Free Press
columnist. Still, the Free Press is undertaking a thorough review of
the situation, as is our policy.
We will report on that investigation just as we do with other investigations you read about in the Free Press.
The Free Press has an ethics policy that outlines our standards, as
well as expectations for staff members. We thought it was important to
make the policy publicly available when we updated it last year. You
can find it at www.freep.com/help/ethics_policy.htm.
And here is Albom’s mea culpa, which ran the day before the editor’s note:
To our readers: I made an assumption in a column this past weekend. It
was a bad move. In a column written Friday for our Sunday newspaper, I
assumed that what I had been told by Mateen Cleaves and Jason
Richardson had indeed happened, that they had indeed flown to the Final
Four, sat in the stands together rooting on Michigan State in
Saturday’s game. That was their plan. Both told me so in separate
interviews. Because the column had to be filed on Friday afternoon, but
appeared on Sunday, I wrote it in the past tense, as if it already had
happened.
While it was hardly the thrust of the column — which was about
nostalgia and college athletes — it was wrong just the same. You can’t
write that something happened that didn’t, even if it’s just who sat in
the stands. Perhaps, it seems a small detail to you — the players
still love their teams, they are still nostalgic, they simply decided
not to go after the column had been filed — but details are the
backbone of journalism, and planning to be somewhere is not the same as
being there.
So I owe you and the Free Press an apology, and you have it right here.
It wasn’t thorough journalism. While our deadlines would have required
some weird writing — something like, "By the time you read this, if
Mateen and Jason stuck to their plans, they would have sat in the
stands for Saturday’s game" — it should have been done. We have high
standards at this newspaper, and I have high standards for myself. We
– the editors and I — got caught in an assumption that shouldn’t have
happened. It won’t again. Thanks.
