From WNYK.

This is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

In these days of intense media scrutiny, newspapers are quick to

offer apologies and fire reporters who breach the ethics of journalism. But when the business side

screws up, newspapers are not always so forthcoming. Case in point, last year a major circulation

scandal broke when it became known that a number of prominent newspapers, a growing number, had long been misreporting and in some cases wildly exaggerating their circulation numbers to boost advertising revenue.

Faced with a crisis, some papers reported on themselves, but others barely mention the scandal.

One of the papers that did opt to cover itself was Newsday.

The Long Island newspaper appointed a five-member team, four reporters and an editor,

to do an exhaustive study of the paper's business practices.

80 articles and 55,000 words later, they continue to do that work.

Newsday's media reporter James Madur is a member of that team.

He described how they worked together.

We really used a two-prong strategy.

One, try to get ahead of the daily developments,

particularly the investigations of the newspaper by various federal

government agencies.

There also a series of lawsuits.

And then the second approach was to dig into what happened here.

Each of the reporters developed an expertise in portions of the circulation operation.

...