The Des Moines Register fired a reporter who targeted a local hero for tweets from his teenage years, after the discovery of posts in which the reporter himself used the N-word.

“I want to be as transparent as possible about what we did and why, answer the questions you’ve raised and tell you what we’ve learned so far, and what we’ll try to do better,” Carol Hunter, the paper’s executive editor, said Thursday in a note to readers. “For one, we’re revising our policies and practices, including those that did not uncover our own reporter’s past inappropriate social media postings. That reporter is no longer with the Register.”