BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer, late of the New York Times, fills his stories with colorful quotations from colorful people saying just the right thing in just the right way. To read a Rick Bragg piece is to ask -Where does he find these folks? As it turns out, he doesn't - necessarily. A week ago it was revealed that one of Bragg's pieces about a Louisiana oysterman was substantially reported by an unpaid stringer -- an unofficial intern who went to Apalachicola and harvested all of the quoted material and description for Bragg's story but received no credit for it. Murmurs about the story led to an investigation by the paper which, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, suspended Bragg for two weeks. Whether Rick Bragg is a journalistic cheat or sacrificial lamb depends on whom you're talking to, but he cut short some of the debate by resigning Wednesday from the New York Times to finish two books. He joins me now from his home in New Orleans. Rick, welcome to OTM.

RICK BRAGG: Oh, thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, how's your week going so far?

RICK BRAGG: [LAUGHS] Well, actually I feel pretty good right now. I have never enjoyed -- I don't know too many people who do actually like waking up to tension, and I am-- I'm happy to be free of it.

BOB GARFIELD: Did you do anything wrong, journalistically, that you believe you have to answer for?

RICK BRAGG:What I did was send a trusted stringer, and a talented stringer, to report an interview for me in a place. If the story had been broader, if it had involved the things in intended it to involve, then I do believe that this would have been absolutely acceptable by any standard. But it was a narrower story, and the reason it was narrower was because what he got was so vivid and so strong and so compelling that it edged everything else out, and anyone who has ever written a newspaper story knows that when you sit down to write it, plans go often out the window. And you write, you use the most compelling material that tells your story. And I will never apologize for using the most compelling material to tell my story. I just am not going to do it.

BOB GARFIELD:I think one of the reasons that people are so amazed about this story is that they're agog that you had these kind of resources at your disposal to do the heavy lifting or at least the local reporting in a story. Did you abuse the privilege?

RICK BRAGG: No, I don't think I abused the privilege. No one should be agog over the use of a stringer. The stringer network has been around a long time. Lots of newspapers dip into that to help them, you know, do their job. I use J. Wes on the Apalachicola story because he was my summer intern; he was very talented; he'd worked for - full time for a small paper already; and he wanted to do it, and the piece was going to generally be a larger piece. It was going to be a broader piece. I was going to work the water wars in Atlanta into it. I even envisioned an ori--a lead originally that would have been from Atlanta.

BOB GARFIELD: You've made it very clear that you don't wish ex post facto to bash the Times over this or anything else.

RICK BRAGG: Absolutely not.

BOB GARFIELD: Nonetheless I have a couple of questions I want to ask you.

RICK BRAGG: Sure.

BOB GARFIELD: About the provenance of this tempest.

RICK BRAGG: Okay.

BOB GARFIELD: First, absent the Jayson Blair debacle, do you believe this question would have come up?

RICK BRAGG: Oh, of course not. Of course not. It never would have come up.

BOB GARFIELD:Three weeks ago, if someone had said "Hey, Rick -- it's come to our attention that you have used this unpaid stringer to do the lion's share of the local reporting in this story and we believe that he didn't get the credit he deserved," would it have led to your resignation?

RICK BRAGG: Oh, of course not. It wouldn't have-- it wouldn't have led to anything. Of course not. But it's, it's a different time now. Wishing that it were not a different time does not--you know, fix it.

BOB GARFIELD: What have you learned from all of this?

RICK BRAGG:Well-- I guess in a way it's, it's hard to say. If I say that I wished I had worked harder to get the young man a byline, then--that is kind of a moot point because I know that we probably would not have been able to get him a byline. But-- it's just hard to answer.

BOB GARFIELD: Rick Bragg famously a fashioner of vivid leads -- what's your lead?

RICK BRAGG:Well I guess I just have to say that-- he walked off with some regrets and a whole lot of relief. But his regrets don't have anything to do with his stories; they just have to do with sticking around a little bit too long to try and write them.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Rick, thank you very much.

RICK BRAGG: No, listen, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg is a former national correspondent for the New York Times. [MUSIC]