The New York Times editor who led the internal investigation into the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal has been appointed the paper’s first standards editor.
Allan M. Siegal, who retains his title of assistant managing editor, will oversee the creation of new guidelines for the use of anonymous sources, bylines and datelines, the newspaper said Wednesday.
In an e-mail to staff announcing the appointment, Executive Editor Bill Keller said Siegal would be “the main internal sounding board for staff members who have doubts or complaints about the paper’s content, whether already published or in the works.”
The position was the recommendation of a Siegal-led committee that examined policies at the Times in the wake of the Blair scandal.
Blair resigned from the paper on May 1 after filing some three dozen phony or plagiarized stories from October 2002 to April 2003.
Siegal, 63, joined the Times as a copy boy in 1960 and worked his way up to assistant foreign editor, where he helped edit coverage of the Pentagon Papers. He became news editor in 1977 and assistant managing editor in 1987.