A front-page, above-the-fold story in the Sep. 21 issue of The Sun, “Undergrads May Teach FWS to Reduce Cost,” caused some distress; it turned out to be wrong. When a front-page story is not correct, a comprehensive look is worth the effort. A few factors were at play here, and The Sun has since taken steps to do right by its sources and its readers.

Taken at its face, the story seemed like a real scoop. With a foundering endowment and a call for spending cuts, departments across Cornell are making difficult decisions on a tighter budget; hypothetically, having undergraduates teach First-Year Writing Seminars might help reduce costs. It might also alleviate problems associated with a growing undergraduate population but a declining number of graduate students.

This is something a lot of people would care about. Many undergraduates — not to mention parents of freshmen — would feel uncomfortable with the idea of being taught by a fellow undergrad.

As we all now know, however, the story was inaccurate as first reported. How did this happen?

The biggest problem I see is that the newsy element of the story was a bit lean. The reporter, Yi-Ke Peng ’11, making her Sun debut as a reporter, did a thorough job contextualizing the FWS program, but the real scoop — undergrads teaching undergrads — seemed entirely dependent on a three-word quote from Prof. Paul Sawyer: There was “a real possibility” this would happen.

Granted, Sawyer directs the Knight Institute, which oversees the FWS program. He is the most credible, authoritative source on potential changes to the program. “He is the one that would make the decisions,” Sun managing editor Ben Eisen ’10 said. “He is the top guy in the Knight Institute.”

But this credibility matters none if the quote is confused or mischaracterized. In an attempt to understand this confusion, I exchanged some e-mails with Sawyer about the story. Both Eisen and Sun news editor Venus Wu ’11, who first worked on the story, spoke on Peng’s behalf.

The confusion was over the growing role of undergraduates in the Knight Institute. Sawyer told me in an e-mail, “The Knight Institute definitely does and could and might and would hire undergraduates under certain circumstances.”

He continued: “That’s not the problem in the story. The problem was in confusing hourly undergrad jobs with instructors of First-Year Writing Seminars.”

It was a mistake to imply that undergrads would become paid instructors in FWS, Sawyer stated, “which is impossible for all sorts of reasons (legal, pedagogical, etc). No one would seriously consider this. So I think the confusion was terminological and nothing more — or at least that’s how we’ve been trying to understand it.”

Sawyer also added that the reporter might have made a “leap” from talking about TAs to paid instructors without either of them realizing that it was happening. Eisen agrees: “It sounded like one question was asked, another one was answered, and it was really neither of their fault. … Neither one really understood what the other was talking about. They were kind of talking on two different wavelengths.”

Even before publication, there was further uncertainty regarding the quote, and whether it applied to FWS or something else. But since the interview was not tape-recorded, Wu said, “there’s no way we could verify what was said in the room.” Wu and Eisen ultimately weighed Sawyer’s authority as the Institute director heavily in whether to run the story.

“On hindsight, we should have dealt with it with a little more skepticism, because, in a way it almost sounds too good to be true,” Wu said, adding that the ultimate decision also showed confidence in the reporter.

“Ultimately, we have to place our trust in the reporters,” she said. “They do the reporting when we’re in the office. We do our best to fact-check everything, but we can’t fact-check the interview itself.”

All of this confusion, however, could have been solved with better corroboration, a point that should not be lost here. Although Sawyer is a very credible source on all things FWS, it never hurts to make another call to someone who can speak on the issue. More sources are always better.

In the aftermath of this, rather than simply run a correction, the paper wrote an unsigned, front-page story correcting the facts and bringing the situation back into its true context. This was the correct move. The story was a larger version of a correction, and there was no need for explanation or apology. That belongs in this space.

Eisen said he also contacted the staff writers with a refresher on the importance of fact-checking. He also noted that The Sun is continually beefing up its copy-editing procedures.

“When we get information like this that’s very controversial,” Eisen said, “we’re definitely a lot more careful with it.”

Rob Tricchinelli is a second-year student in the Law School and also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He can be reached at public-editor@cornellsun.com. The public editor column appears alternate Mondays this semester.