In 2013, Jesse Katz, a former "Los Angeles Times" reporter, said of the newspaper's coverage: "As an "L.A. Times" reporter, we saw this series in the "San Jose Mercury News" and kind of wonder how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope, and we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the "L.A. Times" and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." And "we really didn't do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. ... And it ruined that reporter's career."