This is a December-January 2005 American Journalism Review story on how news outlets should handle a crisis: Plagiarism, fabrication, accusations your story sits on a foundation of forged documents ... the sort of thing we've all become sadly familiar with.

The story opens with how the Seattle Times coped with an accusation of plagiarism against a staff veteran.

It found more than a dozen instances of plagiarism in his file. The person resigned. The editor wrote a 3,000-word note to the paper's readers explaining what happened. The paper also re-evaluated its ethics guidelines.

The Seattle Times' response to the discovery of an ethical lapse was praised by some for its transparency and criticized by others for its harshness. Any newspaper or television station or network that finds itself under fire, from NBC during the "Dateline" exploding fuel-tank fiasco in 1992 to the New York Times during the Jayson Blair scandal (see "All About the Retrospect," June 2003), is bound to be criticized for its reaction to wrongdoing, no matter how its leaders handle it.

But at the close of a year that brought to light some spectacular ethical problems, including the Jack Kelley plagiarism and fabrication case at USA Today (see "Who Knows Jack?" April/May) and the "60 Minutes" National Guard documents debacle, and in a climate in which many Americans question the credibility of the news they watch, read and surf, how should journalists respond when their reporting is called into question?

Should editors, producers and reporters answer every person out there who challenges their work? And just what should they do when they realize they have an ethical lapse, or even an ethics crisis, on their hands?

When can a news organization simply say, "We stand by our story"?

"All of us have been challenged at times when we had absolutely full faith in our story," says John Seigenthaler, founding editorial director of USA Today. "It's perfectly legitimate to say, if you are confident you are right, 'I stand by the story.' I have done that if I thought the challenge was not being made in good faith."

"When we are confident the information we publish is true and factual," he says, journalists must "trust the reader to place our credibility against the credibility of a challenger."