Detroit News Publisher says Burgess edit "poorly handled"

Yesterday, we exclusively broke the news Scott Burgess resigned as The Detroit News auto critic after his editors bowed to a request by an advertiser to water down his negative review of the Chrysler 200. Today, a chastened Jonathan Wolman, the paper's publisher, says the edits were "poorly handled."

To be fair, I actually received the following comment from Jonathan Wolman, publisher of The Detroit News, late yesterday evening, but missed it in the flurry of emails I was dealing with over yesterday's story. I apologize to Wolman for not having it included earlier than this morning. That said — here's what he had to say:

Our intent was to make an editing improvement and we obviously handled it poorly. We should have let the online version of his review stand as written, as we did the print version.

I think all of us can agree with Wolman on that. But the damage is done. Scott Burgess no longer has a job (although he now has plenty of free time to work on his Hipster Travel Guide website) and The Detroit News has a lot farther it needs to go before its credibility is restored.

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