Every question asked of Sheila Coronel and Steve Coll and during Columbia Journalism School press conference following their report on Rolling Stone's UVA article. April 6, 2015.

1. Every question asked of Sheila Coronel and Steve Coll and during Columbia
Journalism School press conference following their report on Rolling Stone
April 6, 2015.
(All name spellings are approximates to the best of my ability)
http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/page/1070-j-school-live/920
Julianna Golden CBS News
“Over the course of your investigation did you give any thought to keeping Jackie
anonymous?”
“Even though one of the main takeaways from the report was this was all sourced to a
single individual?”
Lloyd Grove, Daily Beast
“You say they cooperated fully, Rolling Stone did. Given that they asserted attorney client
privilege? And we all know how important lawyers are in the preparation of articles like
this. And they could have waived the privilege? Do you really think they cooperated fully?”
Alicia Hastey, NBC News
“The publisher has said the blame still lies with Jackie. Do you think they are blaming the
victim too much?”
“Flat out, who’s fault was this?
“Last one: do you think everyone at Rolling Stone should keep their jobs?”
Katie Anders, Guardian
“Did you ever consider looking at Sabrina Erdely earlier stories with Rolling Stone? Was
that ever on the table with the magazine?”
“Just to clarify you said that you didn’t have access to the same sort of information? Does
that you mean the magazine did not offer any fact-check files or you were not going to
pursue it? “
David Wright, ABC News
“Your report is framed as a matter of journalistic best practices, on the accountability
question if it was your newsroom shouldn’t someone lose their job? Still that’s a kind of
accountability? That’s a big statement of accountability, isn’t it?”
Mary Ann Georgantopoulos, Buzzfeed News
“Can you talk a little bit about how much Will Dana really knew. He said he was unaware
Rolling Stone did not know full extent of Drew’s identity but then he later on gave the go
ahead to not pursue Drew. So how much did he really know about this person throughout
the reporting process?”

2. Sara Ganim, CNN
“On the accountability issue, I wonder, away from the firings, what did you think about the
decision not to change any of their policies?”
“I believe they said they didn’t think there was anything wrong with their policies and that
this wouldn’t happen again because it was an isolated incident.”
“The second thing is there was a big chunk of this story that was never disputed. And it was
about UVA’s historical response to sexual assaults including it’s response to Jackie’s claims
which were public before this article was published. Now that they’ve taken it down do you
think an important part of this story was lost?”
Christine Erfee(sp?) CBS News
“One of the things we came across reporting this story was a lot of the people we talked to
who had been interviewed by Sabrina said they felt she came into this with a bias. You guys
talked about this a little bit. But how much of a role do you think it played that she, it
seems, based on some of the people she interviewed, said that she went in with the
narrative pre-constructed and then looked for the stories that fit that rather than letting
them play out. And letting the story unfold as it would.”
Jonathan Wachtel, Fox news
“You didn’t give a straight answer, though, as to what you would do if you were in charge of
the magazine. Personally what you would do, given what you’ve investigated. Would you, in
fact, sack certain staff? And also can you speak to the long-term damage that this has done
to the integrity of journalism? To the integrity of Rolling Stone?”
Michelle Goldberg, The Nation
“Jackie’s story still seems unsettled after this report has come out. Did you make any effort
to re-report kind of what actually happened to her? Find out if something did indeed
actually happen to her. That’s been unclear, especially the Washington Post stories. They
showed some instances of her being sort of fabulist, other instances where the 3 friends did
indeed believe that she had been victimized if not in the exact way she described. Did you
try to get to the bottom of that and if not why did that not need to be re-litigated in this
report?”
Bill McGowan, Coloring the News
“One of the things I was struck by in piecing these things together and doing some re-
reporting, was the very meager amount of time Sabrina Rubin Erdely spent on the ground
in Charlottesville itself doing reporting for a 9,000 word investigative piece. She spent 2
maybe 3 days. The first meet with Jackie was during the long weekend of September 11,
and she never went back. Do you think that played a role in this at all? Or could you maybe
comment how it did. And can also you possibly explain, why I didn’t see it in the report, but
again I didn’t read the report as closely as I would have liked, but did you find that, that she
didn’t spend a lot of time on the ground?”

3. Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair
“Given Rolling Stone’s response to your report. Why do you think they asked you to do the
report in the first place?”
Irin Carmon, MSNBC
“Some thing you guys have mentioned a few times in the report and that came out of
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s mouth herself is this idea of the dramatic example. This emblematic
report. Part of the issues that came up in the piece, and you guys didn’t spend a lot of time
on this was that, at no point did she admit what she didn’t know, or how she knew what she
knew, so she talked about friends and she didn’t attribute that was from a single source and
not from the friends. I’m wondering if you guys could comment as teachers of journalism
about the issues in narrative journalism but in journalism at large, in trying to find a sort of
unnuanced bad guy/good guy kind of story the kind that actually did get a lot of attention
here but ended up blowing up.”
(Woman, name outlet unknown)
“I wondered what if anything is known about the nature of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s
relationship financially with Rolling Stone. And what the costs might have been had the
story been killed as problems arose…”
Hajer Naili, Women’s eNews
“The University of Virginia has had very bad press especially pertaining to violence against
women, and the first phone call that Sabrina made is to a staff member of the University of
the Virginia Emily Renda, have you ever considered that this story was gave [sic] by the
University of Virginia to Rolling Stone such as PR ploy after the bad publicity given to the
university?”
Tom Clutts (sp?) CNN
“You said last night that in your review you found no invention of facts, no instances of
dishonesty on the part of the reporter but she clearly misrepresented this arrangement
that she supposedly made with Jackie not to contact the friends. IN fact as your report
indicated, Jackie even provided a means by which she could have done that. In her story
she also said that she reached out to one of the friends, in fact your report found that she
did not do that. I’m just wondering given that can you really say that she didn’t engage in
dishonesty?”
Sidney Smith, iMedia Ethics
“Did you find out in your investigation any indication of any lawsuits or any potential
lawsuits against Rolling Stone?”
Marlie Hall, CBS News
“What kind of precedent is there for news organizations requesting this type of review?”
Laura Lee, CNN
“Do you agree with Rolling Stone’s decision to take down the story?”

4. Peter Sterne, Capital New York
“You mentioned in the report that Erdely had failed to present specific details of her
reporting to Phi Kappa Psi she essentially just asked them for comment. But you didn’t
really mention why she may have done that. Do you think she did that because she knew
that the reporting she had done was problematic or thinly sourced? Why do you think she
didn’t present what she found to Phi Kappa Psi and let them confirm or deny it?”
Patrick (sp) (German-outlet)
“One of the most striking details in your report I found something about the very first
interview Erdely did with Jackie and the detail is that she herself found the detail of the
shattered glass table immediately implausible and so apparently confirmation bias was in it
from the very start. And it seems to me this must have something to do with the wider
frames of narrative about this kind of thing in the wider public debate. So while in
retrospect this detail where everyone says it’s like from a horror movie is sort of the best
instance you can give why the story is implausible at first it seems plausible because of this
very detail from like a horror movie scenario. So my question would be whether you
considered including some more analytical reflection about these more general narratives,
the kind of [sic] surrounding this issue in the wider political debate in this country?”
Ravi Somaiya, New York Times
“I was just wondering you guys have been immersed in the Rolling Stone’s editorial process
for some months now, do the two of you trust what you read in the magazine now?”
“Were you disappointed that after reading the report Jann Wenner came out and said ‘well
it started with Jackie’ which struck me as the opposite of the conclusion of your report.”
Lauren Gambino, The Guardian
“I was just wondering if there was any advice to Rolling Stone about how going forward
they can make sure the readers trust their reporting from here on out. Was there any
advice that they might need to do things differently in their next big cover story or make
clear make certain points in a story so their readers trust them.”
(Second round of questions. People don’t re-identify who they are at the mic.)
“Just wondering if you can address concerns that one of the ultimate failures of the Rolling
Stone piece is that it actually damages efforts to address sexual assaults on college
campuses.”
(same person) “So you are saying there is a silver lining to all of this?”
“Now that there have been there a lot of apologies given, and Erdely has apologized to the
readers of Rolling Stone and her colleagues and the university community don’t you think
that the fraternity deserves an apology as well?”
(same person) “I don’t remember being apologized to.”

5. “Do you believe there was any sort of ethical failure on Rolling Stone by placing some of the
blame on Jackie or putting too much trust in Jackie?”
“You guys have acknowledged today there were a few things in the story that were true and
that there were other women who could have been used as a better anecdote. Do you think
this story should be rewritten. Do you think taking it down completely might let UVA off
the hook a little bit?”
Catherine Melody(sp) Journalism school
“You say that the problems here were systemic, they were institutional, given that, given
that you are not pointing the finger at any one particular individual, editor or reporter. Are
there other stories from Rolling Stone that the spotlight now should be drawn to. If this is
indeed a systemic institutional cultural practice.”
“On the larger question of accountability, it has indeed come to light while we’ve been here
that Phi Kappa Psi is indeed suing. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, how
strong is their case, or just a general sense of what function that serves in the
accountability for a journalistic mess like this.”
Joe Sykes (sp), Uptown Radio
“Do you think Sabrina Erdely should ever write again for a national magazine?”
(same person) “To go back to hypotheticals if you were an editor would you ever
commission her to write a story?”
“You said explicitly in the report and something along the same lines today, that Erdely
believed firmly that Jackie’s account was reliable. Is there any way to empirically judge that
or are you just going by the fact that there is no evidence in her notes or from
conversations with her editors that she ever faltered.”
(same person) “But considering that another very emotional account has gotten us into this
problem in the first place is that grounds for drawing this conclusion?”
“Some people, including Jonathan Mallow (sp) at the Times, have suggested that gender
may have played a role that Sean Woods and Will Dana were reluctant to question a
woman survivor’s account. Do you think that if there had been more women, in higher
editorial positions at Rolling Stone they might have been more skeptical?”
“As far as the practices we see in your report that the fact checker did try to improve the
story and asked for accurate attribution of the quotations yet the fact checker didn’t seem
to have any weight in the decision-making process. Do you think that fact checker,
especially if you have the means to afford them, they should be involved in the decision-
making process?
“As to the question of UVA’s institutional indifference, there was a case study in the Rolling
Stone piece, of a woman with a pseudonym of ‘Stacy.’ Did you look at that? Did Stacy exist

6. and was the rendering of Stacy’s case in the piece by Erdely accurate? Did you get a
transcript at all from that 9-hour hearing that was mentioned?”
(Same person) “Would that have been one of the other cases that Will Dana was referring
to as to alternate anecdotes?”
“Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on your interactions with Sabrina -- you said that
you spent two days with her in the Philadelphia area. What was her temperament like, how
contrite was she, and just to the extent to which she cooperated on your investigation.”
(Same person) “Would you say that she accepted accountability? Or did she ever try to
eschew responsibility in your interactions with her?”
“Do you know how all this has effected Jackie?”
“I’m wondering if you think that the fact that she was a freelancer or contributing writer
played into anything in terms of whether there was a kill fee the kind of financial stakes
that she might have had that are pretty structural to magazine journalism in not having this
story fall apart.”
(Same person) “And she could have walked away is what you are saying?”
Jonathan Wachtel, Fox news
“Do you think that Rolling Stone should be sitting up there with you talking about the
situation rather than you speaking about the report. Obviously there are some questions
that you can’t pick up. Also do you believe that, what are the pros and cons in the future for
any magazine or other news outlet if they find themselves in this precarious situation to
come forward and actually ask your university to do a review.”
Tay Orr,(sp) Columbia Spectator
“I was wondering how exactly you hoped to bring the lessons from this report back to the
classroom to your students?”