Oops is now a newspaper term

Katharine Seelye has an article in The New York Times about bad behavior by a veteran reporter:

When an editor at The Cape Cod Times was reading the newspaper last month, she thought an article about the Veterans Day parade from the day before seemed slightly off.
The article, written by Karen Jeffrey (photo), a longtime reporter, told of a Ronald Chipman, 46, and his family from Boston. The Chipmans apparently were oblivious to Veterans Day until they saw the parade. Jeffrey described the family in detail, including a scene in which the parents used their smartphones to find information about the holiday, creating a “teachable moment” for themselves and their children.
Maybe it was the tidiness of the tale. Or the notion that adults were unfamiliar with Veterans Day. But the article did not ring true to the editor, and she set out to find the Chipmans. She searched several databases but turned up nothing. She reported her finding to the editor in chief, Paul Pronovost.
Pronovost asked the editor— whom he would not name to protect her privacy— to check other recent articles by Jeffrey. After more people in the articles could not be found, he then asked Jeffrey for help in locating the Chipmans. Jeffrey said she had thrown out her notes. “That’s when the alarm bells went off,” Pronovost said. He ordered a full review of her work. For three days, three editors pored over a public-records database called Accurint. They examined voter rolls and town assessor records. They checked Facebook profiles and made phone calls. And they concluded that, over the years, Jeffrey had written dozens of articles that included people who did not exist.
The next day, 5 December, Pronovost and the publisher, Peter Meyer, wrote a front-page apology to their readers: “In an audit of her work, Times editors have been unable to find 69 people in 34 stories since 1998, when we began archiving stories electronically,” they wrote. “Jeffrey admitted to fabricating people in some of these articles and giving some others false names,” they added. “She no longer works at the paper.”
The episode shocked those at The Cape Cod Times, which has a daily circulation of 36,000 and Sunday circulation of almost forty thousand.
Before the apology appeared, Pronovost told newsroom staff members what had happened. “Some people had no idea at all, and some probably were shocked by the scope of what we were talking about,” he said in a recent interview in his office here. And some “just simply couldn’t believe” that Jeffrey would do such a thing.
Jeffrey, 59, who had been at the paper since 1981, was perceived as reliable. She had covered the police and courts for many years, and there were no questions raised about the people in those stories. It was only her features— about parades, a Red Sox home opener, a road race— that contained fabrications.
Jeffrey has not made any public statements and did not respond to several requests for comment. Pronovost said: “I did ask ‘why’ but she didn’t have an answer.”
Her falsifications puzzled some precisely because they involved the easy articles. “You go to the parade, you get a quote, you put it in the story,” said Matt Pitta, the news director at Qantum Communications, which owns four radio stations in Hyannis and competes with The Cape Cod Times, which is owned by News Corporation. “It’s not like trying to get a quote from an indicted politician who won’t speak to you.”
Many people also wondered how her fabrications could have gone on for fourteen years without being discovered. Of course, nonexistent people do not call up to complain. But Pronovost said that her editors saw no red flags.
Among those most surprised were the law enforcement officers who worked with Jeffrey.
“She was always fair and accurate,” said Sheriff James M. Cummings of Barnstable County, which includes Cape Cod. Learning that she had fabricated stories, he said, was “like a punch in the gut”.
Detective Lieutenant Bob Melia of the Massachusetts State Police said that Jeffrey was a good reporter. “She reported it like it is,” he said. “If we asked her, ‘Can you keep that information out?’ she would say, ‘No, I can’t, it has to be part of the story.’ We respected her.” He said she had been taken off the police beat a few years ago and he believed she was “down in the dumps” about it. “By making her do community-type reporting, she thought it was a demotion and an insult to her, and maybe that’s why she did what she did,” he speculated.
Pronovost said that, in a newsroom overhaul, Jeffrey had been switched to politics and then to early mornings to cover breaking news for the website, but added that she still covered the police and courts part time. He said that “down in the dumps” was probably “a fair characterization” of her mood after she was switched to mornings, but that her fabrications had started long before the switch.
In their apology, the publisher and editor wrote: “Clearly, we placed too much trust in a reporter, and did not verify sourcing with necessary frequency.” To prevent it from happening again, they said they would make spot checks of sources more often and hold ethics training sessions.
Pronovost said he had expected “to get hammered” by critics “as the latest example of lax standards,” citing past cases of plagiarism and fabrications at other publications, including The New York Times. Instead his newspaper was praised in journalism circles and received positive messages for the front-page apology and response.
“The paper did a good job of getting out in front of it,” Sheriff Cummings said. “The community was appreciative.”
Pitta, the Qantum news director, who also teaches journalism at Emerson College, commended the newspaper. “I think they very much understand the gravity of what happened and are addressing it properly,” he said. “But I worry the general public will continue to get more jaded than they already are,” Pitta added. “We’re trying to find ways to survive because of the fragmented way our business has become, especially with all the social media. We don’t need to drive people away from traditional media sources because they don’t feel that what they’re getting is correct.”

Rico says it's what happens when you demote someone...