Ad Disclosure
AJC issues corrections for Georgia football investigation, fires reporter
Published:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced Wednesday that it has issued multiple corrections to a story from earlier this summer that investigated the Georgia football program.
The AJC also announced it has terminated the author of the article, investigative reporter Alan Judd, for “violating the organization’s journalistic standards.”
The AJC says it conducted a review of the story after the Georgia Athletic Association demanded a retraction, citing fabrications and errors. The AJC declined to issue a retraction and said its review found “no instances of fabrication.”
However, the AJC says it found multiple aspects of the story that did not meet its own standards.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the AJC’s announcement detailing what corrections have been made to the original article:
The AJC’s editors said they could not substantiate one of the article’s key assertions about Head Coach Kirby Smart’s tenure: that 11 players remained with the team after women reported violent encounters. The “precise count of 11 players” could not be substantiated under the AJC’s standards, the statement said.
In a second error, the article improperly joined two statements a detective made minutes apart into a single quotation, the statement said. Connecting the sentences did not change the meaning of the quote, but the way it was presented to readers failed to meet AJC standards, according to the statement.
Here’s a statement from AJC editor-in-chief Leroy Chapman:
“Our editorial integrity and the trust our community has in us is at the core of who we are. After receiving the university’s letter, we assigned our team of editors and lawyers to carefully review each claim in the nine-page document we received, along with some additional source material that supported the original story. We identified errors that fell short of our standards, and we corrected them.”
Chapman also apologized to the AJC’s readers and the University of Georgia for the errors.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
