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Mitch Albom Update

Elizabeth Spiers, of Mediabistro.com's FishbowlNY column has this hilarious take as to how the Detroit Free Press editor Carole Leigh Hutton has slapped-- or rather lightly patted-- Mitch Albom's wrist following disclosures that he fabricated details of one of his columns.

Leigh Hutton has said that Albom and four other Free Press employees, "each of whom had the responsibility to fix errors before publication" of Albom's column, will be disciplined in some unspecified manner. For more details, I recommend this story in Editor & Publisher.

I also have previously posted here on my blog-- a lengthy analysis by our very own media columnist-- describing how Leigh Hutton's missteps in the early days of the Mitch Albom affair detracted from the credibility of her newspaper. Indeed, our Pressing Matters column is one of our most widely read features (as many as a dozen unique visitors). Expect another Pressing Matters column on Albom later this week.

This L.A. Times account is also interesting in that it predicted before the fact that Albom would face nothing more than a slap on the wrist for his actions. Jack Lessenberry, a journalism professor at Wayne State University, who also writes a media column for an alternative weekly in Detroit, told the Times: "Albom is really the only recognizable name they [the Free Press} have. I think they will bend over backwards for marketing reasons not to fire him."