Magazine apologizes for article with made-up details

NEW YORK (AP) -- The editors at The New Yorker were not laughing after publishing a humorous article that contained what turned out to be made-up details.

"It doesn't matter that this was a lighthearted piece," editor David Remnick said Tuesday. "We can't mix fact and fiction or change details without telling the reader. And it was important to come clean and apologize as soon as we were made aware of this problem."

The article, "My Fake Job," appeared in the magazine's Nov. 27 issue. Writer Rodney Rothman tells about a 17-day sojourn to an unidentified dot-com company in Manhattan's Silicon Alley. Without ever actually being hired, Rothman starts showing up for work as a "junior project manager."

His point was to illustrate the transience and anonymity of workers in computer-related fields.

He wrote: "They sat in thousand-dollar ergonomic office chairs, but their nameplates were made with paper and Magic Marker. The message was clear: The chairs could be resold; the employees were expendable."

The writer was able to blend in so successfully, in part, by telling co-workers he was from "the Chicago satellite office." He made phone calls to friends and pretended to be talking business, spritzing the conversation with "dot-com" this or "networking" that.

But Rothman failed to tell The New Yorker's editors that his mother had worked at the company, clearly making it not as serendipitous a work experience as he had portrayed. He also wrote about receiving a workplace massage from a co-worker named Melissa, which he later admitted never happened.

"The hell of it is that this could easily have been fixed in the editing and by being straight with the reader in print so that an otherwise accomplished piece of writing could also have been honest with the reader," Remnick said.

The editor wrote an apology that was published in the Dec. 11 issue.

Rothman is a free-lance writer and not an employee of the magazine.

Rothman's manager, David Miner, said massages were given at the dot-com workplace, but conceded that Rothman never received one.

"He loves the New Yorker. Having an article published by the New Yorker was the pinnacle for him. He stands by the piece as a humor piece, but he also stands by The New Yorker's apology," Miner said.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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