Suspended Blade staffer steps down

4/10/2007

A Blade staff photographer who digitally altered a front-page photo has resigned, and editors are reviewing other pictures taken by the photographer, the newspaper said yesterday.

Allan Detrich, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, told Blade editors last week that he altered a photo of the Bluffton University baseball team for his personal files and mistakenly transmitted the wrong picture for publication.

The photo, which ran on Page A1 on March 31, showed Bluffton University players kneeling at their first game after a bus crash killed five players in Atlanta. The photographer digitally removed the legs of a person standing behind the No. 19 banner.

The Blade s policy is to never alter photographs, and the newspaper apologized to its readers in a correction on Friday.

Mr. Detrich resigned Saturday, a day after he was suspended by the newspaper, said Blade spokesman Luann Sharp.