PressEthic

It was pretty obvious Jayson Blair would disappear from journalism after The New York Times caught on to his unique interpretation of reporting. But remember Macarena Hernandez?

Hernandez was the San Antonio Express-News reporter who Blair plagiarized. In an interview with journalismjobs.com, Hernandez said her view of the profession has changed.

For a while after the storm, I considered leaving journalism. Once you've seen the restaurant's dirty kitchen, the food no longer tastes the same.

It’s also a little scary to hear a reporter say it’s amazing people still trust us. Hernandez said she now empathizes with sources who say they’ve been misquoted, and that the media can “chew on a story way longer than we need to.”

The latter might not be a surprise. However, I was surprised at how little the plagiarism itself seemed to contribute to Hernandez’s outlook. It seems more likely that Hernandez almost left newspapers because being the subject, not the writer, of a news story was in several ways a rude awakening.

Most of us will never plagiarize someone’s work - hopefully not, at least. But we can all take value from the lessons Hernandez learned while on the other side of reporters’ scrutiny.

Journalists should never cheat or lie; we get that message early on. But the subtleties shouldn’t go unnoticed either. If reporters - even the ones who haven’t gone through what Hernandez has - can consider themselves through the prisms of the people they interview, it might not be so crazy that the average reader believes what they write.