About 8 years ago, while in the midst of his book promotional tour after he was caught fabricating and plagiarizing quotes for the New York Times, I did an email interview with Jayson Blair. At the time, this was a great get for a website called The Black Table and our media interview series, even though Blair was…
Former NYT managing editor Gerald Boyd lost his job after the Jayson Blair scandal, which could be interpreted either as just desserts for snoozing while Blair fucked up the paper, or as an unjustified bit of scapegoating—made worse by the fact that Boyd was black, and the NYT wasn't exactly swarming with minority…
The years from 2000 to 2009 were unified by fakeness — high-profile charlatans penetrated virtually every area of life (as Frank Rich also pointed out). From fake celebrities to fake journalists, here's a top ten of our favourite* frauds.
Disgraced ex-Times reporter Jayson Blair isn't the only unlikely figure giving ethics seminars these days. Former governor Eliot Spitzer is scheduled to speak at Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics tomorrow. Not quite as surprising: Tickets are still available. [NYDN]
"I delivered an unfortunate blow to a profession that not only did I personally love doing, but that I value for society," said Blair in an interview on Fox News Sunday. But don't worry! He also has a master plan.
• Get ready to see commercials appear inside magazines. CBS is embedding tiny screens in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly, which will play a clip promoting the network's fall season. What will it look like? Like this. [WSJ]
• Poor Rupert: The billionaire chairman of News Corp. only collected a compensation…
Fake reporter Jayson Blair! Did you know he was once a professional Amazon bookseller? It's true! And what is he doing these days? A reasonable guess would be, "Something involving drugs and shattered lives," and that would be totally correct.
On Monday at a Manhattan screening of We Live in Public, a documentary about Pseudo's late-'90s experiments in 24/7 Internet broadcasting (you can watch the trailer here, a bearded man got up and started ranting about how his obsession with one of Pseudo's programs, Toilet Boys, forced him to seek high-speed Internet…
Keri Russell turns 33 today. Kenneth Cole turns 55. Chef Tom Valenti is 50. Author Jonathan Ames is 45. Ex-con shoe mogul Steve Madden turns 52. Real estate broker Leslie Garfield turns 77. Actress Catherine Keener is 50. Disgraced ex-Times reporter Jayson Blair is 33. Chaka Khan is turning 56. Actress Michelle…
Remember when we all got outraged that Rod Blagojevich got a book deal? Well we should've guessed it came from a shady Hollywood publisher with a history of lawsuits and bankruptcy!
We were sent this tear-jerking tale of the going-away party for a New York Times employee who got the best gift ever. "The story: Merrill Perlman, the director of copy desks at The Times, who has 'chosen' to leave the paper (read: got pushed out) received a send-off today in the same spot where the Pulitzers were…
Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current…
Lehman Brothers' Japan office is under scrutiny for making a little mistake: it lost a $350 million investment in a fraud. They thought the project they were investing in was backed by a reputable Japanese trading house, but it really wasn't. How did the scammers pull off their master plan? With fake stationery and…
Siberia, the Hell's Kitchen bar that was a home away from home for legions of disgruntled alcoholic journalists, closed in May. Its owner, Tracy Westmoreland, has been promising ever since that the bar will reopen. Now he's saying it louder!
The Newseum, a gallery dedicated to the profession of journalism, is almost ready for visitors! Soon-to-be-former Times media reporter Kit Seelye takes a look at the monument to press freedom, decidedly one of the most expensive museums under construction.
Thanks ever so much to those who submitted possible sin-erasing obituaries for ex-New York Times staffer Jayson Blair. The challenge was to come up with a first line that could successfully supplant likely references to Blair's career crash at the NYT. Hardly any references to hard drug use, disappointingly. The…
We're glad to see that disgraced New York Times journalist Jayson Blair is larding his self-pity with more angry cynicism these days. However, in Matt L. Perrone's otherwise charmingly angry extended interview on PopMatters (conducted when Blair served as MC at a high school awards ceremony in Virginia), the man…
We were recently directed to PX This., the "witty, irreverent (star-studded) four year journal of a struggling New York commercial-artist/fashion-designer moonlighting as a maitre d' at some of Manhattan's most well-known restaurants." While perusing its contents, we came upon the following entry (all contents…
