BOB GARFIELD: USA Today Editor Karen Jurgensen and managing editor for news Hal Ritter were forced out of their jobs this week. Executive Editor Brian Gallagher also announced he will leave his position after a new top editor takes over. Heads are rolling in the wake of a blistering report by an independent panel citing institutional weaknesses at the nation's top circulation daily -- weaknesses which, the panel found, enabled foreign correspondent Jack Kelley to plagiarize and fabricate stories over more than a decade, despite the suspicions of colleagues and sources. Kelley's deceptions were first documented in January by a preliminary in-house investigation headed by Mark Memmott, one of Kelley's former editors, now a reporter at USA Today. Like everyone else I've just named, Memmott is someone I've known since I worked at that paper 20 years ago. Mark, welcome to On the Media.

MARK MEMMOTT: Hi, Bob. Thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, as the person who headed up the in-house investigation that pre-dated this report by the tribunal, and as one of Jack's editors for years, you've spent a lot of nights staring at the ceiling, wondering and worrying. Tell me about that.

MARK MEMMOTT: You wonder and you worry about what did I miss? Did someone tell me something that I should have acted on? Why didn't I read those stories more closely? When you look at his work now, you know, if you read several years' worth of stories, you begin to see that, wow, they were fantastic. And yeah, I'm kicking myself. There's lots of other editors here who are kicking themselves. I'm sure there are editors who were here in the early days and are now on to other things who are kicking themselves. We failed.

BOB GARFIELD:The report referred to your investigation several times in a sort of dismissive way, saying that it was flawed from the outset because it was looking for evidence to disprove allegations against Jack Kelley, as opposed to prove them. How stinging was that rebuke?

MARK MEMMOTT: It was a shock, and it was wrong. We did not begin to try to disprove anything. At least, I didn't. We did begin with a presumption of innocence.

BOB GARFIELD:And indeed, whatever your frame of mind, that investigation did unstop the hole in the dike. When you discovered that Jack had conspired with former sources and leg men to cover up his misdeeds, that allowed all the other lies and deceptions to gush out, no?

MARK MEMMOTT: Yes, we were in a preliminary stage, but we lifted up the rock and found a pretty big crawler underneath.

BOB GARFIELD: Now Mark, [LAUGHS] I, as you know, worked at USA Today for the first three years of that publication, and I have my own little horror stories from the earliest days. I had one experience reporting on a Russian defector showing up at National Airport in Washington, and about her first chaotic moments in the United States, but my lead on that story was rejected, because it didn't conform with the executive editor's premise of huddled masses greeted with the welcoming arms in the land of milk and honey. Were the seeds of the Jack Kelley situation planted in the very concept of USA Today and its founding devotion to form over substance?

MARK MEMMOTT: Oh, I think that there's probably a lot of truth to the fact that the seeds of the Jack Kelley tragedy go right back to the founding of the paper. I don't know if your specific kind of example is quite what produced Jack. My opinion would be more that Jack was a young guy when this paper began. It was too often acceptable practice to take things from the wires and rewrite them -- to do clip jobs from other newspapers and perhaps not fully credit them, and as the newspaper grew up and stopped doing those sort of things, Jack apparently didn't.

BOB GARFIELD:Well on a related subject, Al Neuharth, the former chairman of Gannett, which owns USA Today, and the visionary who founded USA Today, took the newspaper to task in his own column in USA Today and said I told you so, I told you so -- if you quote unnamed sources, it is a path that will lead to hell.

MARK MEMMOTT: Obviously, unnamed sources are a huge issue in journalism and always have been. On the one hand, Watergate wouldn't have been revealed without them. On the other, in all publications, not just ours, source rules are loosely enforced, I would argue, and probably need to be more tightly enforced. However, that doesn't explain Jack just completely making things up. That's not a anonymous source issue. That's a fabrication issue. And the anonymous source rules would not have caught that at all.

BOB GARFIELD:Which leads back to the conclusion that, notwithstanding what the report has to say in, in identifying institutional problems at USA Today that created the environment for this to take place, that the Jack Kelley tragedy is the Jack Kelley tragedy -- that this is a flawed human being who lied and betrayed his newspaper and his colleagues and his closest friends. Tell me, as someone who worked with this guy for two decades, what it's like to deal with that fact.

MARK MEMMOTT: You thought you knew somebody, you thought you trusted them, you never would have imagined he could do this sort of thing, and it, frankly, makes you wonder when you're reading other newspapers and magazines -- should I trust this? And that's pretty sad, and I don't know when we'll get over it here.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Mark, thanks an awful lot.

MARK MEMMOTT: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Former Deputy Managing Editor Mark Memmott is a reporter at USA Today. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Next up, America's oldest, coolest new water cooler show: "60 Minutes". And a prosecutor and a pornographer consider obscenity.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.