Suspended N.Y. Times Reporter Says He'll Quit - Rick Bragg Decries 'Poisonous Atmosphere' (BWA-HA!)

The Washington Post ^ | May 27, 2003 | Howard Kurtz

[Timesink]

washingtonpost.com

Suspended N.Y. Times Reporter Says He'll Quit
Rick Bragg Decries 'Poisonous Atmosphere'

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 27, 2003; Page C01

Month after month, year after year, Rick Bragg said, his mission was to "go get the dateline," even when that meant leaning heavily on the reporting of others.

"My job was to ride the airplane and sleep in the hotel," the New York Times correspondent said yesterday from his New Orleans home. "I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.' . . . Those things are common at the paper. Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants."

But now what he calls a "poisonous atmosphere" has descended on the Times -- one that prompted the paper to suspend Bragg for two weeks for practices he considers utterly routine -- and the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter says he will quit in the next few weeks.

"Obviously, I'm taking a bullet here," he said of the suspension imposed last week. "Anyone with half a brain can see that." But, he said, "I'm too mad to whine about it."

[Bonaparte]

Nice line-up. Ruth Shalit would be a nice addition.

[Kay Soze]

"It is shameful that some people are using it in a power grab at the newspaper. It's just about the saddest thing I've ever seen."

Did he actually see it or did he hire a stringer to see people using the situation to get even?

[Bonaparte]

Preface to Coloring The News by McGowan.

[stands2reason]

"I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews..."

I'm thinking that means he called the folks over in, say, Little Rock from his desk in NY, hopped on the next flight to the Little rock airport, writing his copy on the way, then phoned in his story from said airport, afterwards hopped on the next flight home.

[Madstrider]

The problem, of course, is that the NYT just has so many resources that they can't properly credit everyone who works on their big stories, and it causes dateline problems. If you've got a staff writer, two stringers and an intern working on the story, it's got to be a b*tch to get the staff writer to the spot, give him time to make phone calls and actually write the thing. I'm not saying Bragg is not at fault here (the Apalachicola story wasn't a deadline rush), but if you use interns and stringers to do the reporting, and the writer has to describe what the interns and stringers saw, and use the quotes they got, you've got both dateline and byline questions. Most smaller papers don't have that problem.