Where is jayson blair now

There was an awkward pause. The students looked at each other, waiting for someone else to go first. A student in the front raised her hand and blurted out the first question. She was referring to the scandal that seismically rocked the journalism world: the revelation that Blair had plagiarized and fabricated many of the stories he had written as a staff reporter for the New York Times. He had copied passages from other publications, conjured up fake quotations and lied repeatedly to cover up his misdeeds.

It is, after all, a question that he has been asked — by editors, journalists, readers — for 13 years. And he has a new byline. While numerous organizations fact-check presidential candidates in real-time, many people just accurately report what the candidate said. And the piece I assigned him had to do with facts. Who better than Jayson Blair to talk about that?

Many journalists treat the implementation of plagiarism detection software or more robust fact-checking as a sign of mistrust and protest against it. However, newspapers and other news outlets can not afford another Jayson Blair. For most mainstream media publications trying to compete online, their reputation is their greatest asset and is something that online-only outlets can not yet duplicate.

If that is lost, then much of their future is likely lost as well. The same as academic and scientific publishers need to get in front of the issue of plagiarism, the need is possibly even more urgent for news organizations.

For newspapers and other news organizations, this issue is only going to get more urgent. The public is getting better armed and becoming more aware about these issues.

For example, Churnalism U. Simply by installing a browser extension, a reader is alerted when content from questionable sources appears in an article, letting the reader make the decision if the content was used and cited in an appropriate way. The simple truth is that readers are not going to become less savvy about these issues. As the technology becomes easier and cheaper, readers are going to get better at checking after journalists and, through the Internet, have a powerful way to share their findings with the world.

In short, where the Jayson Blair scandal was truly prophetic was in its public nature. She notified her editors, who in turn contacted the New York Times. Shortly after the paper started investigating Jayson Blair handed in his resignation and checked into a mental health clinic. Blair would never work in journalism again but turned up years later as a life coach in Virginia , a job he continues today.

At the time of the scandal, The New York Times was the premiere newspaper in the country, possibly the world. Such a huge black eye on such an important paper had a major impact not just at The Times, but also on journalism as a whole. The most immediate and obvious impact was that The Times created the position of public editor.

The idea was that, if such a position had existed while Blair was engaging in his misdeeds, one of the interviewees Blair had falsely claimed to have spoken to or someone else from the public could have easily come forward and stopped him sooner. The idea of the public editor proved popular, expanding to newspapers across the U.

However, the role of the public editor had been long filled at other newspapers by the ombudsman, who was supposed to act in a similar capacity, but without the ranking of an editor.