Pionerr Press’s Second Guess
But Pioneer’s deputy executive editor Alan Henry, and bureau chief Carol Goddard, who oversees 15 Pioneer papers in the northern suburbs, convinced Fullick to change her mind. She remembers them offering various arguments, which ranged from making it possible for her to enter the story in contests to the one that swayed her, informing readers who’d survived incest who she was so they could call.
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She described a dream–a naked girl running “in the dark of night,” trying to hide from someone chasing her in a house with glass walls. “Even though I never felt I had a daddy, I cry out one more time for a daddy to protect me. Daddy! Daddy! I realize one more time that no one will ever be there for me.”
The abuse, says Fullick, ended when she was 14. She hasn’t seen her father in nine years and isn’t sure what state he lives in now. They do not communicate.
The breakdown evidently involved middle managers making a decision that the top brass didn’t know about. Davis said that Carol Goddard (who wouldn’t talk to us) got nervous. She “expressed a concern to Alan Henry that if the opinion [Fullick’s] piece ran again elsewhere and if there was anything actionable in there, that Pioneer would be doubly liable, or more liable, if subsequent legal action came out of this.”
Further review? we asked.
Relations between Pioneer management and the Newspaper Guild have been frayed for years, and this episode hasn’t helped. Routliffe happens to be the guild’s Pioneer unit chair, and she waded in last week, firing off a letter to publisher Richard Gilbert. Routliffe expressed the guild’s “extreme disappointment” with how Pioneer handled Fullick’s “gut-wrenching and powerful personal testimony.” Pulling Fullick’s byline was “illogical and cowardly” and forcing her to withdraw her personal account “guts the entire series.”
