Settlement reached in former N&O reporter’s lawsuit against McClatchy editor

A settlement has been reached in a case against McClatchy’s vice president for local news — an agreement that marks the final piece of a lawsuit filed by a former News & Observer reporter who was dismissed in 2018.

Anne Blythe lost her N&O reporting job after a plagiarism investigation sparked by a writer from another publication who claimed that her work had been copied without attribution.

Robyn Tomlin, then The News & Observer’s executive editor, wrote a note to readers at the time, explaining that the newspaper had reviewed more than 600 of Blythe’s stories and found “at least a dozen that contained phrases, sentences or, in some cases, whole paragraphs, lifted from other publications.” Tomlin is now vice president for local news for McClatchy.

Blythe sued Tomlin, The News and Observer Publishing Company and McClatchy Newspapers, disputing her editor’s note to readers, saying it contained false statements about her and that she had not been given a chance to respond to the allegations. She also asserted that Tomlin’s words kept her from working as a journalist.

“Anne Blythe filed suit in July 2019 against The News & Observer and its then-editor Robyn Tomlin to defend herself against accusations of plagiarism that cost Anne her job as a writer at The N&O in 2018 after nearly 30 years with the paper and related publications,” said a statement from her attorney, James Hash. “She has now resolved her dispute with Ms. Tomlin through an out-of-court settlement.”

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Portions of the suit involving the N&O and McClatchy were settled in 2021 as part of the newspaper’s bankruptcy proceedings.

“While we continue to stand behind the decisions made and what was published,” Tomlin said in a statement to the N&O, “I’m glad we can put this dispute behind us and move on.”