USA Today Editor Quits Amid Ethics Probe

The editor of USA Today, the nation’s largest-selling newspaper, stepped down Tuesday, citing the “sad lessons” from revelations of fabricated news reports by one of the paper’s star reporters.

The departure of Karen Jurgensen, 55, who had run the newspaper since 1999, was announced in a terse, businesslike e-mail to USA Today editorial employees from Publisher Craig Moon.

Moon gave no explanation for Jurgensen’s decision, but in a separate message, Jurgensen linked her departure to the mushrooming internal probe into a spate of news reports rife with fabrications and plagiarisms allegedly committed by former foreign correspondent Jack Kelley.

“Like all of us who worked with Jack Kelley,” Jurgensen said, “I wish we had caught him far sooner than we did. The sad lessons learned by all in this dreadful situation will make USA Today a stronger, better newspaper.”

Jurgensen’s decision to leave marks the second time in less than a year that an ethics scandal at a major newspaper has led to the resignation of a top editor. In June, Howell Raines was forced to quit as executive editor of the New York Times after the disclosure of serial fabrications by reporter Jayson Blair.

On Tuesday, inside USA Today’s newsroom in McLean, Va., reporters and editors huddled around their computer cubicles, speculating aloud about Jurgensen’s possible replacement and whether other editors would fall.

Some editors who had worked with Jurgensen over her 21-year career questioned whether the Kelley affair was the only reason for her departure, noting that he had fooled three of her predecessors and dozens of other USA Today editors.

“All of us who were Jack’s editors over the years made the same mistakes,” said Mark Memmott, who handled many of Kelley’s recent articles. “It didn’t start under Karen’s leadership and Jack betrayed many people over many years. It’s the case of the last people in the chair who get the blame.”

Last month, the newspaper documented a decade-long stretch of journalistic sins it said were committed by Kelley, including a fictitious tale about a drowned Havana woman who later turned up alive, repeated instances of apparent plagiarism and dramatic reportage on international terrorism studded with details that could not be confirmed.

Kelley resigned under pressure in January, after he was accused of trying to deceive his editors when they became suspicious of his work. In the months since, a team of USA Today reporters investigated Kelley’s work and a trio of veteran newspaper executives probed the newspaper’s culture, last week submitting a still-secret report to Moon.

The newspaper’s apparent decision to lay some of the blame on Jurgensen raises knotty issues of accountability, said James M. Naughton, former president of the Poynter Institute. “There is a valid question about whether she is really the fall guy, or fall editor, for someone whose sins went back a decade a longer,” he said.

But as many of the nation’s top editors gathered in Washington for the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, other industry veterans insisted that responsibility begins at the top.

Robert H. Giles, curator at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and a former top editor at Gannett, the media company that owns USA Today, said the internal report delivered last week on the Kelley affair by three outside editors clearly played a role in Jurgensen’s departure.

“Nobody caught it, and, yes, somebody needs to be accountable, and the editor is ... where the buck stops,” said Giles, who edited the Detroit News.

Soon after the first disclosures of Kelley’s fabrications were made public early this year, USA Today staffers took to the Web with anguished and bitter recriminations over how he was able to get away with it so long.

Some insisted he was a pet of top management, even used as a marketing mascot, despite complaints at lower levels. Others said Kelley had been waylaid by jealousy of a rising star.

USA Today founder Al Neuharth prompted a new wave of anguish on a media website, the Romenesko weblog, last week when he blamed the Kelley affair on the newspaper’s new emphasis on “Tiffany-like tastes” and prizewinning journalism over slowing circulation figures.

Several editors and reporters at the paper said Tuesday that they were proud of USA Today’s invigorated efforts at investigative and narrative journalism and that some staffers worried that Tuesday’s developments, coming after Neuharth’s criticisms, might foretell an abandonment of those efforts.

“We’re all like scared chickens,” said Foreign Editor Linda Mathews. “There’s been a lot of parsing of sentences lately.”

In a message last Tuesday to the staff, Moon said he had received the report from the three outside editors brought in by Gannett to oversee the investigation into Kelley’s work and planned to make a “public announcement” this week.

Several USA Today veterans said it would probably deal not only with the Kelley episode, but also with staff morale and the paper’s internal culture.

Some staffers also speculated the report might raise questions about lingering resentment over the 2001 firing of three USA Today staffers for tracing the phrase “Kilroy was here” in blue dust near a statue outside the 11th-floor suite of Gannett Chairman and CEO Douglas H. McCorkindale.

Although Jurgensen, as editor, played a role in their firings, her supporters on the staff said much of the lingering resentment has been directed at the newspaper’s corporate side.

Executive Editor Brian Gallagher, Jurgensen’s second-in-command, seemed shaken at the departure.

He read a statement saying: “I don’t know anyone at this newspaper who won’t be saddened by Karen’s departure. Both personally and professionally, it’s a great loss.”

Times staff writer Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.