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Rick Bragg's "dateline toe-touch."

slate.com · 1,825 words · saved by 1 readers

An editor’s note in today’s New York Times gently chastises Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg for what would be a firing offense at many newspapers, especially in the post-Jayson Blair era. On June 15, 2002, the Times ran a Page One article datelined Apalachicola, Fla., about the oystermen of the Gulf Coast. The byline credit went to Bragg, but that was wrong, the Times note explains. “[W]hile Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder.” Visiting a scene just long enough to claim a dateline for an article based on somebody else’s uncredited reporting—let’s call it a “dateline toe-touch”—may not be as egregious as writing stories datelined Palestine, W.Va., without leaving your Brooklyn apartment, as Jayson Blair did. But it’s dishonest for a writer like Bragg—who prides himself in brushing literary lacquer to the down-home details he harvests—to publish under

Rick Bragg farms it out Copy Link Share Share Comment Copy Link Share Share Comment An editor’s note in today’s New York Times gently chastises Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Bragg for what would be a firing offense at many newspapers, especially in the post-Jayson Blair era. On June 15, 2002, the Times ran a Page One article datelined Apalachicola, Fla., about the oystermen of the Gulf Coast. The byline credit went to Bragg, but that was wrong, the Times note explains. “[W]hile Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the sce

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