AJC fires reporter Alan Judd after making corrections to report on UGA football
After finding “two elements” of its story of its investigation into Georgia football’s handling of sexual abuse allegations not to meet its journalistic standards, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced Wednesday it has fired reporter Alan Judd.
The university’s Athletic Association had demanded the article to be retracted through a nine-page letter through general counsel Michael Raeber, but the AJC said it would not. The school also met with reporters last week to push back at claims made in the article.
The AJC did issue corrections to the June 27 article, it said in a story posted on its website Wednesday afternoon.
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“Our editorial integrity and the trust our community has in us is at the core of who we are,” editor-in-chief Leroy Chapman said in a statement. “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.”
AJC fires Alan Judd, makes corrections to Georgia football report
The AJC said it could not substantiate that 11 players remained with the team after reports of violent encounters with women.
The “precise count of 11 players” could not be substantiated under the AJC’s standards, according to the AJC which “removed or adjusted several paragraphs of the story that depended on that count, and edited the headline.”
The AJC's new headline on the story online says: "UGA football program rallied in two incidents when players were accused of abusing women."
The second correction was a result of two statements in a single quote being joined together that were made minutes apart.
“Connecting the sentences did not change the meaning of the quote, but the way it was presented to readers failed to meet AJC standards,” the AJC said.
A Georgia athletics spokesperson said Wednesday night that it had "no comment at this time."
Chapman said while the AJC’s mission is to hold people and institutions accountable, the publication “must hold ourselves to this same standard and acknowledge when we fall short, which we have here. We apologize to the university and our readers for the errors.”
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: AJC fires Alan Judd, makes corrections on UGA football report
