nick sylvester = maker upper

1) Nick is now the effigy of the Village Voice for everyone who wants to take a shot at them. This has been picked up for national dailies via the AP.

2) In more Shattered Glass parallels, everyone wants to play the cool snoop role and dig up the huge conspiracy a la Caruso's AP story, which ends with:

In an August story about cheating on college campuses, Sylvester described interviewing a student who spent $500,000 to have a multiplication table tattooed over his entire body; a Harvard Medical School graduate who cheated with Morse code; a Boston College junior named Simeon Criz who cheated using a specially designed deck of playing cards; and a Manhattan doctor named Noam Feldstein who delivers "a hundred newborn babies each day."

Boston College said it had no record of a student named Simeon Criz. The board that licenses doctors in New York said it had no record of a physician named Noam Feldstein.

They're playing themselves in the movie of this in their minds.

xpost: But who WOULDN'T want to be Peter Sarsgaard in that movie?? Even if he does look exactly like Chloe Sevigny.

One your 1), Chris, yes, that's what happens when you create situations out of whole cloth and run them as fact. Your publication's reputation takes a big fucking hit. This is about much more than NS now.

Well Nick's brand reveals that you can get all the way to senior associate editor being pretty much full of shit at all times.

i mean, i wonder how journalists who did actual research for their stories feel about having their bylines held in the same esteem as the "obviously" fake stories. no matter how outre or unbelievable they seemed, those faux-satirical pieces have now cast a shadow on their reputations as well.

that said, my stomach did turn a bit when the e & p story showed up on drudge.

If you can't tell this is satire, you probably shouldn't be, like, reading.

-- Thomas Tallis

was this on a thread here, or what? i'd love to read it. i've got an interview coming up (first non-review work! pat on the back) with a guy who i may disagree with on a lot of issues surrounding his work. i'm sure all the hardened pros can give a cub a tip or two (to make a thread worth a good goddam for once)

Musicians, usually supplying entertainment instead of information, aren't held to a code of ethics and standards.

If they were then we would never have David Allen Coe.

MARISSA MARCHANT SIGHTED ON PROGRESSIVEHOUSE.COM!!!

Good: "You know, some people might consider a song like that a little mysoginistic"

Bad: "Quite frankly, I think you're a fucking woman-hater and an total douchenozzle, Mr. Mayer!"

"Jonathan Swift proposes using Irish babies as foodstuffs."

"More to the point: How does anyone, in this day and age, think they can get away with it? As CBS News learned during Memogate, the Internet has connected us to the point where critics can seize on a misstep nearly instantaneously. That's not to say we live in an era free of journalistic sin – far from it. But technological innovation has made it pretty damn hard to get away with an outright fabrication, which is a pretty good reason not to do it, if ethics ain't enough to sway you."

The technological innovation of the voice fact-checking after the article has already come out? Yeah, damn those internets.

certainly the stakes were raised with this being a cover story (tho we do not know if it was assigned as such), but this is pretty much a standard nick sylvester piece. it has a very narrative structure, it's full of asides and the quotes are very rich. of course this was cooked -- that's his style!

it is certainly within a publication's rights to refuse that sort of writing -- witness wolfe and the like thriving at new york and esquire in the '60s while the new yorker thumbed its nose at them for shoddy journalism. it's a style of writing with a long history: swift, dickens, london, thompson and countless more. in fact, up until the '20s, that *was* journalism. the point was the moral, not the facts.

of course this changed and this has largely been for the good (i say largely because politically this leads to lots of he said she said pieces where the existence of cold hard facts is ignored -- it's a twist on journalism 101 that benefits the deceiver). but there are still writers who work around this, most notably -- and ironically -- strauss. i could see glass as a possible parallel here except that i can't imagine nick ever really honestly claiming his pieces as fact. he writes classic ledes and all of that with a wink and a nudge to make sure we're in on the joke.

and so in this instance i think the issue came from: a) someone complaining (as was absolutely their right to do) and b) a new editor who was unfamiliar with how nick writes. i agree that there are journalistic standards -- i strongly advocate them -- but nick is not a journalist! he's a features writer, plain and simple. and so from that miscommunication (or at least that's what i see it to be) between the editor seeing nick as a journo and nick seeing himself as nick, we've reached this hubbub that i'm finding really hard to take.

somehow, even tho we're a society so immune and oblivious to fact, we are now demanding total transparency in the strangest places. sure, politicians and companies can lie, but not movie stars or writers that we never read. there's this false standard that has arisen from i dunno the fuck where, and through a confluence of bad decisions and timing (nick is not absolved of guilt here, tho i do not really blame him for being the writer that he is) nick has gotten caught up in this. needless to say, i'm pulling for him.

Jams, I have to be blunt -- this completely undercuts what I think is a good and spirited defense, because it puts the onus on us that somehow we are all individually at fault for this failing which you envision as endemic. I find that insulting, if not patronizing, and I hope I don't have to spell out why.

well, those issues are a part of the story, so you shouldn't shy from them. and you would be doing your subject a disservice if you discussed these reservations in the piece without confronting them with them and getting their side of the story. but there are ways of doing this, as Whiney intinmated, without making you look like an arrogant, uninformed douche.

a) someone complaining (as was absolutely their right to do)

If you agree it is their right, are you also defending Nick's practice in this particular instance? I don't find it an impossible balance to maintain, but it strikes me as a questionable one.

this isn't particularly interesting to the reader or integral to the narrative or artistically brilliantly rendered. it's not like some editor was unable to grasp the "style" that made it ok for him to write this. it's not like we're arguing about the bats rising out of the desert in "fear and loathing in las vegas", we're arguing about somebody writing "this guy told me x in y" and the guy saying "i was never in y and i didn't say x".

and no i am not defending nick's practice of attributing false quotes and actions to real people. to fictional people -- or composites -- i'm all for it.

Rationalize it all you want, but feature writers still have an obligation to tell the truth. Their styles may be more creative than the sweaty stuffed shirts documenting city council meetings, but they are held to the same ethical standards.

The Village Voice shouldn't be required to bend to suit Nick Sylvester.