Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Triblocal.com for shoveling dodgy online content into print. In April 2007, the Tribune Company launched Triblocal.com, a Chicago Tribune-affiliated suburban news site with a small reporting staff and a big appetite for user-produced articles. As Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner later reported, the site published many glowing articles about Mark Pera, a local official running against an incumbent congressman, all written by Patrick Corcoran, a member of Pera’s staff. (The articles carried Corcoran’s name, but didn’t disclose his connection to Pera.) Triblocal looks like a news site, but it mixes staff reporting with gussied-up bulletin-board fodder: Catholic school employees write up diocese awards, a local hospital files advice for treating heartburn, and so on. And once a week, editors select a handful of articles to be distributed with the Tribune as an insert or a wrap. That’s how a Corcoran piece headlined DEMOCRAT MARK PERA PICKS UP SUPPORT ended up wrapped around subscribers’ papers on January 10. Triblocal editor Kyle Leonard told CJR that “in retrospect” he wished Corcoran’s online contributions had carried a disclaimer, and said that a staff member should have checked out Corcoran before the print article was published. According to Leonard, Triblocal now vets the authors of all politics-related pieces, online or not. Other contributors are asked, though not required, to disclose their affiliations.

The Plain Dealer is guilty of a similar lapse in the Journalism 101 maxim: check it out. The PD regularly selects user comments from its Web site to publish in its print newspaper, and on January 22, the paper reprinted a rant accusing a city councilman of tearing down neighborhood homes and felling historic trees. Problem is, as the paper’s reader representative disclosed, the Plain Dealer hadn’t checked out the false accusations or...

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