AP News, April 6th, 2007
A staff photographer for The Blade digitally altered a front-page photo of an Ohio college baseball team that lost five players in a bus crash, the newspaper says.
Allan Detrich will be suspended with pay while the paper investigates, The Blade said Friday.
"The Blade takes such matters very seriously," the paper said in a statement.
Detrich told Blade editors that he altered the photo for his personal files and mistakenly sent it to the newspaper. He called it "a bad mistake on my part."
The picture of Bluffton University's baseball team was published March 31 and showed players kneeling at their first game after the crash in Atlanta. Photos of the team in other Ohio newspapers showed the legs of someone standing in the background. The legs did not appear in The Blade photo, taken from a similar angle.
The Blade said it was notified of the possible alteration by the National Press Photographers Association.
The Associated Press has removed access to 50 images created by Detrich from AP's photo archive. The Blade will review those images, along with Detrich's other photos published in the newspaper, said Blade spokeswoman Luann Sharp.
"We're looking to see if this is a one-time occurrence or if it has happened before," she said.
Detrich began working for The Blade in 1989. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature photography in 1998 for a series of pictures of children who fled abusive parents. He was the Ohio News Photographers Association's photographer of the year in 1992 and 1994.
The Blade, owned by Block Communications Inc., has a circulation of 135,000 on weekdays and 180,000 on Sundays.
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