Michael Finkel and the New York Times Magazine

As any regular Romenesko reader knows, the New York Times Magazine has fired a contributing editor, Michael Finkel, for using "improper narrative techniques" in his profile of a Malian teenager who worked on a cocoa plantation. The basic facts of the case are simple: Finkel conflated the stories of many different boys to tell a story which wasn't true. Furthermore, parts of his story weren't even true of any boy at all, let alone the subject of the piece. That's the sort of thing which you might get away with at Seventeen, but it's just not done at the New York Times.

Finkel understands that, and doesn't blame the Times for firing him. Neither do I. But after reading an old profile of Finkel, and a new story in the New York Observer today about the whole affair, a slightly more well-rounded picture emerges.

Finkel's prose is spare and clean, and a huge amount of work goes into it: "the dirty dark secret is that it takes me forever to make it sound like I just wrote it in a minute," he says. Since the New York Times gig was by far his most high-profile job, it stands to reason that Finkel would have put even more effort than usual into the story he submitted to them after travelling to Mali. The problem was that he hadn't found what he was looking for: he'd pitched a child-slavery story, and found only boys working for very low pay and in great hardship. If anything, the story was that aid agencies were playing rather fast and loose with the slavery label, because it suited their own ends.

The Observer talked to the photographer who travelled with Finkel to Mali, Chris Anderson.

After a couple of weeks of reporting in June and July of last year, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Finkel had a lot of trouble writing. Mr. Anderson said Mr. Finkel went through a lot of drafts. To compensate for the lack of a hard child-slavery angle, Mr. Anderson said, The Times editors wanted Mr. Finkel to "try to make it more personal, more human, so Mike tried to do that and wrote a couple more drafts, and they were all rejected for one reason or another."

These drafts, it would seem, involved much more than tweaks: they were full-scale rewritings and restructurings. A huge amount of time, work and frustrated effort was going into this story, and Finkel was very keen to get it out of the way so that he could move on to other projects: specifically, a mountain-climbing expedition in Nepal.

Only the New York Times editors ever saw the original drafts, so only they know for sure, but I would be very surprised if the first couple of drafts had anything ethically wrong with them. The problem was that Finkel had travelled to Mali to report one story, and was now being pressured to write another: one which his reporting really couldn't sustain. According to Adam Moss, the editor of the New York Times magazine, Finkel wrote the story which ended up being published "as an exercise, to put down on paper what he wanted to write," although that hardly explains how it got into the hands of the magazine without any indication that it wasn't true.

Freelance journalism is a risky gig, for reporters and editors both. Stories get pitched and commissioned before they're fully reported, and most of the time the story which emerges at the end is different from that envisaged at the beginning. Problems arise when, after the reporting has been done, the resulting story turns out to be very different indeed from the one which was commissioned.Reporters are generally happy to go back to a magazine with a tale along the lines of "as I was reporting on X, I stumbled across a much bigger story: Y". What they're less keen on doing is saying "the more I looked into X, the more I realised there really wasn't a story there at all."

It's the job of editors to help journalists find the angle and write a good story, even when the reporting doesn't necessarily back up the original commission. A lot of the time, the editor will propose that the reporter phone a few more people and get the extra material needed for the new story, as it's now envisaged. The problem in this case was that no one was proposing that Finkel return to Mali, and there was no way that the extra material could be obtained over the phone.

Eventually, Finkel gave the New York Times what it wanted: a compelling third-person account of a typical "child slave". I've written a similar kind of account myself, although in a very different context. My story was written directly from my notes, a couple of hours after I talked to the subject of the piece. Even though the conversation was still fresh in my mind, I relied heavily on what I wrote down as he was talking.

Finkel, by contrast, doesn't take any notes at all when he's talking to his subjects, only writing down his "impressions" later in the day. Furthermore, he wrote the whole New York Times story without referring to his notes once. With all the good will in the world, I have great difficulty imagining how such a story could ever be wholly accurate. To that we must add the facts that the story was being written in order to pacify an editor who had already rejected several drafts. In such a context, it becomes clearer how the noteless writer ended up producing something better than the story which he was actually able to write, given the reporting.

While Michael Finkel is certainly to blame for this affair, I think there is a lesson here for all features editors: Beware stories which change significantly after the reporting has been finished. All editors should go back to their writers and ask for more material when more material is needed. But if what they got originally was short on crucial elements, then they should bear in mind the fact that there's a good chance the journalist hasn't had any access to those elements. If you're an editor and you get back a revised draft which adds in stuff which wasn't in the original and which couldn't have been obtained in the mean time, proceed only with extreme caution.

Posted by Felix at 0:26 EST

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As the waterline rises here in the little hole in the wilderness, curiosity runs rampant and
Christian Longo grows moldy in isolation on the
Oregon Coast under guard. Michael Finkel is one
of his aliases and mentors...will book ensue or
are these ramblings of madness!?!

-Phil Monk
Vernonia

Posted by: Phil Monk at 12:54 EST, February 17, 2003

Saw "Journalist fights order to turn over Longo tapes," in Oregonian.

I am a senior journalist living in Oregon and writing in Boulder. To obtain my files, 30 years worth on organized crime, the chief judge threw all my possessions and work on the streets of Boulder. Free speech is not challenged, free speech in America is gone.

Posted by: BettyArlene JamesRN at 1:09 EST, February 23, 2003

It goes to show what an ass Adam Moss is. How many stories on African and African American social problems has he published. I have lost count. In addition to the HIV and Blacks column, we had the Nigerian Woman about to be stoned, the Crips leader, the Charles Murray and Black IQ story -- it does not end. Adam Moss has serious black issues and the NY Times needs to address them.

Posted by: Ron Mwangaguhunga at 14:34 EST, August 23, 2003

Michael Finkel and the New York Times Magazine

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