DP receives results from investigation of reporting practices during South Carolina presidential primary trip

The Daily Pennsylvanian recently received the results of an investigation conducted by DP alumni to review the reporting that went into a post that was retracted in February.

During a trip to South Carolina for the primary, a video captured by a DP staffer and posted with incorrectly transcribed captions led to sparring between the campaigns of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), culminating in Cruz asking his Communications Director Rick Tyler to resign.

Following the DP’s eventual retraction of the blog post containing the video, DP Editor-in-Chief Lauren Feiner and DP President Colin Henderson asked a group of alumni to conduct an official post-mortem investigation.

“We have an amazing group of alumni who reached out to try to work through some of the mistakes we made from the beginning,” Henderson said. “We felt it was a logical step to formalize it and try to institutionalize as many of the suggestions they had as possible, and this was just the best way to do it.”

Executive Editor of Politico Peter Canellos, Managing Editor at ProPublica Robin Fields and writer at The New York Times Binyamin Appelbaum conducted the report and passed on their findings.

The report called the video incident a “misstep,” but also said that DP editors “demonstrated admirable concern for the DP’s reputation” by reaching out to ask for an external post-mortem investigation.

Ultimately, the alumni came up with five things that the DP could do to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future.

First, they urged editors to apply the same standards across all platforms. The DPolitics blog, where the video appeared, was meant to have a more casual voice, which the alumni said could have contributed to a lack of accountability.

Second, the alumni urged DP journalists to seek responses from the subjects of any story or video before publication. This way, details may be clarified and not discovered later, like the fact that the book Rubio was referring to in the video was a Bible, which drastically changed the meaning of what the DP staffer transcribed as what he thought he’d heard.

Third, the alumni called for all content to be assessed before publication by at least one person who was not involved in creating it. Fourth, they recommended clarifying the chain of command during trips like the one to South Carolina. On that particular trip, all the reporters present were editors or highly ranked on the DP’s editorial board.

“Someone whose judgment and perspective wasn’t affected by being ‘on the ground’ should have taken on the role of story editor,” the alumni wrote.

Finally, the post-mortem investigation called for the DP to develop a clearer policy on corrections and retractions.

“The editors deserve credit for being transparent in handling the firestorm over the Rubio video,” the alumni wrote. “But their uncertainty about what threshold they needed to reach to justify a correction or retraction led to a multi-phase, slow-motion retreat that compounded their problems.”

Feiner said the organization has already begun to implement these changes.

“We now try to make sure that there’s an appropriate amount of distance between the editors and the stories,” she said. “In the cases where an editor may be closer to a story or source through activities they’re involved in, we make sure they’re not the only one looking at the story.”

She added that the DP plans “to implement the standard that we apply to our normal articles to all of our platforms,” including the DPolitics blog.

Neither Feiner nor Henderson said they were particularly surprised by the report’s findings.

“There was nothing incredibly surprising about what we got from it,” Henderson said. “What was important was that we take away something tangible from it, and something that has a lot of credibility and something created by outside eyes. I think it’s something all of our staff can get behind and use as a reference point moving forward.”

Feiner said the investigation provided a learning experience.

“This entire process has forced us to really evaluate ourselves in a way that we haven’t been challenged to do in the past,” she said. “As a result, we’ve really been able to figure out weak spots that probably would have been revealed later on, just because of the nature of how quickly media is changing. I think we’re now trying to move forward by implementing stronger structural changes and setting ourselves up to perform effectively in a 24/7 media environment.”

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