A US daily has apologised to readers, saying a longtime reporter admitted to fabricating names of people used in dozens of articles dating back at least to 1998. The Cape Cod Times, based in Massachusetts, said the reporter, Karen Jeffrey, who had been employed since 1981, "no longer works" for the newspaper.
Publisher Peter Meyer and editor Paul Provonost made the disclosure to readers Tuesday in the extraordinary apology. "There is an implied contract between a newspaper and its readers. The paper prints the truth. Readers believe that it's true," they wrote. "A good newspaper holds nothing more sacred than its role to tell the truth. Always. As fully and as fairly as possible. This is our guiding principle, so it is with heavy heart that we tell you the Cape Cod Times has broken that trust."
The paper's internal review was "unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically," the editor and publisher said. They wrote that on Tuesday, "Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names."
Jeffrey's sources were verified in a number of articles from police and court news, politics and a series on returning war veterans. "The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare - a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener - where some or all of the people quoted cannot be located," the apology said.
"In 2011, for example, a story on the Fourth of July parade in Cotuit featured Johnson Coggins, 88, - the patriarch of the family - and a longtime Cotuit summer resident. No one by that name can be found using public-records searches and there is no Coggins in the town of Barnstable's assessor's database. We were unable to locate five other people featured in that story."
The editors used a variety of search techniques, including a public-records database tool, searches of voter rolls and public records, as well as Facebook profiles and attempted phone calls. "We must learn from this painful lesson and take steps to prevent this from happening again," Meyer and Provonost wrote.