Dear Readers,

At 2:24 a.m. on Oct. 14 this past week, The Daily published a news story about a talk at the Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program — Stanford’s liberal arts residential-learning program for first-year students — that featured alumna novelist Brittany Newell ’16 M.A. ’18.

The article documented the rationale and circumstances for Newell’s invitation to SLE after her work as a dominatrix drew scrutiny from The Daily Mail and The Stanford Review, as well as Newell’s response.

The original article included a description of an alleged incident in which two students filmed Newell during the talk. Those students were not named, but they appeared in a photo of the talk in the body of the article that could have made them identifiable to their peers, particularly in SLE. They did not receive an opportunity to respond until about 2:30 a.m., after the article was published.

This timeline did not meet the Daily’s standards for fair reporting, which clearly state that “When an assertion is made by a source about a specific person or organization, they should be contacted and given a reasonable amount of time to respond before publication.”

The next day, the reporter of the article conducted a follow-up interview with one of the students, who denied having filmed the talk. The student also emailed The Daily’s editors that afternoon with detailed concerns about not having received a chance to respond.

About five hours after receiving that complaint, The Daily’s editors apologized by email, began a review of the reporting and editorial process for the article and independently offered the student an opportunity to add a statement to it. As we did with the source who alleged the incident, The Daily’s editors offered anonymity for a statement if he could share a compelling reason to request it. Perhaps because he had already spoken to the reporter that day, the student did not respond.

By Friday afternoon, The Daily’s editors had concluded the original reporting process did not meet The Daily’s standards for fairness. We therefore removed the photo and description of the alleged incident altogether, and added an editor’s note explaining the error.

We regret that the published article went unchanged for nearly 48 hours after we learned of the student’s concerns. Our response should have come more quickly. More specifically, we regret that this caused the students distress and potential misunderstanding among their peers.

We do not take lightly the responsibility to treat all subjects of our reporting with fairness and respect, which underpins our trust with the Stanford community. The Daily failed to live up to that responsibility in this case.

The original fairness issue also should not have made it past us and our editorial team. We will be tightening our editorial process at every stage and holding additional training sessions for our incoming news reporters to ensure that we do not repeat similar errors.

Sincerely,

George Porteous ’27, Editor-in-Chief

Sterling Davies ’28, Executive Editor

Hayden Thompson ’27, Executive Editor