The Atlanta Journal-Constitution issued two corrections to a report detailing how Georgia’s football program has handled sexual misconduct allegations against players.
On Wednesday, eight days after an attorney representing the university sent a letter demanding an apology and retraction, the AJC announced that it fired the article’s author, Alan Judd, for violating the company’s journalistic standards.
“Our editorial integrity and the trust our community has in us is at the core of who we are,” AJC 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.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has issued corrections to a recent investigation into the University of Georgia football program’s handling of sexual abuse allegations against players and recruits. https://t.co/V97L5wmzAR
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution (@ajc) July 19, 2023
While the newspaper’s internal review found no fabrications in the report, it could not substantiate the “precise count of 11 players” Judd said remained on the team after accusations of sexual abuse. The original article, which was updated with a new headline following the probe, also “improperly joined two statements a detective made minutes apart into a single quotation.”
“A critical part of our mission is to hold people and institutions accountable. It is a responsibility we take seriously,” Chapman said. “We 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.”
Judd had spent almost 25 years with the AJC as a leading investigative reporter. The publication has published other stories regarding the Georgia football program’s culture, including a look into multiple speeding citations before the fatal crash that killed a player and team staffer.