Here at the New Yorker, a Literary Imbroglio

Rodney Rothman, an East Coast kid who made his name as a comedy-writing wunderkind for late-night TV, is riding out a literary storm in L.A. He hopes that while he’s working on an upcoming sitcom for Fox, the fury over the article he wrote for New Yorker magazine will subside.

Rothman, 27, may have to wait awhile for that. The world of elite magazines is still aswirl over what was possibly the juiciest blunder to hit print last year. The New Yorker, fabled for its editorial integrity, its fact-checking prowess and its journalistic ethics, published an article by Rothman in November, titled “My Fake Job.” The trouble is, fakery may not have been just in the title but also in the telling of the tale.

David Remnick, 41, editor of the New Yorker, sounds weary and wary as he declines to discuss Rothman or the problems resulting from the story. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like,” said Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was named editor in July 1998, only the fifth editor in the magazine’s 75 years.

The only ones willing to talk about this entire escapade are executives at Luminant Worldwide Corp., where Rothman had his fake job. The firm, based in Dallas but with offices in New York and other cities, works with corporate clients to develop Internet strategies.

The story describes how Rothman infiltrated the firm--it was unnamed in the story--an office he appeared to have stumbled into by accident. “It was the first Internet office I’d ever seen. . . . No one stopped me when I came in. The sense of transience was overpowering,” he wrote. He described how he settled into one of many unused desks with computers, signed up for his own phone extension, fantasized about a pretty co-worker and appeared for work religiously for the next 17 days. Nobody, not even the security guards or the manager, seriously questioned who he was or what he was doing there.

Later, when the story of his exploit was published, some readers said Rothman had perfectly described the alienation and emotional disconnect that occurs in e-business environments.

Others called him a deceiver or worse. Because, it turns out, Rothman didn’t just happen into a strange office where he didn’t know anyone. His mother worked at the firm. His mother, reportedly, was out of town while her son played his prank and left the firm before his story was published. The identity of the firm was quickly exposed on the Internet by employees who read the story and recognized their workplace.

In its Dec. 11 issue, the New Yorker published an editors’ note:

“We have learned that in his piece ‘My Fake Job’ (Nov. 27) Rodney Rothman changed identifying details about the workplace and described an incident--a massage at the office, as it happens--that did not take place. Also, the author should have revealed that his mother worked at the company. The magazine does not disguise details or mix fact and fiction without informing the reader (not even in a comic piece like this one), and we sincerely regret the error.”

One might think this announcement of malfeasance would be the end of it. But People Who Care About These Things--and generations of loyal New Yorker readers do--would not let go. The Internet sizzled with messages to magazines and media sites, asking how such obvious inaccuracies could have gotten into print. How could the New Yorker’s crack staff of 16 fact-checkers, fabled for ferreting out even the tiniest misstatements and mistakes, allow unsubstantiated material to pass through?

This is, after all, the magazine that sends its checkers to see the movie before they scrutinize a film review. The one that checks the visual accuracy--down to the buttons on the shirts--of the work of its famous cartoonists.

Someone close to Rothman, who does not want his name used, says the magazine obviously had no idea whom they were dealing with. “If you send Steve Martin to cover a convention, you won’t get the same coverage as if you sent Walter Cronkite.”

In college, Rothman wrote jokes for “Saturday Night Live.” At 21, he became a comedy writer for David Letterman’s “The Late Show.” He was named head writer at 24, with a reputation for audaciously inventive skits.

Those who revere the New Yorker find it unsettling that they could be misled in even a tiny way. “Sure, the New Yorker is renowned for accuracy,” says Bryce Nelson, professor of journalism at USC. “But even the best checkers can’t check facts that are not there. And editors can be fooled.”

He cites the now-famous 1998 case of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old journalist at the New Republic in Washington, D.C. Glass not only made up isolated facts but entire, riveting sagas. The New Yorker’s chief fact-checker, Peter Canby, apparently allowed himself to gloat: “We would have smoked it out very quickly,” he told the New York Times about Glass’ lies. “The good checkers have an instinct, and they just know if [a story] is solid or not. . . .”

That quote, now circulating on the Internet, has come back to haunt the New Yorker, along with newly minted jibes. A recent satire in Salon magazine, for example, depicts New Yorker editor Remnick hosting a new game show featuring contestants who play not for money but for “the honor of being noticed by the New Yorker.” Top prize: a day as a fact-checker.

Remnick won’t talk about Rothman or the specifics of what went wrong, but he will talk about principles involved. “The fact that it was a comic piece, a funny piece, doesn’t make a difference. What you cannot do is undermine the readers’ understanding of what is fiction, what is nonfiction and the line between the two.”

When that is blurred, he says, “you have a choice. Either pretend it didn’t happen or hide it or come out immediately and say there is a problem and here’s what it was, and then move on.” The latter is what the New Yorker did.

Like Remnick, Rothman won’t discuss specifics. “I can only say I am pleased with how the story came out. And anybody who knows me knows those aren’t words that escape my lips too often.”

At Luminant, Richard Scruggs, executive vice president and vice chairman, says the firm became aware of the article “almost immediately after it was published. Certain descriptions of the building, the floors the offices were on, the refrigerator with free drinks for our employees--it was all very recognizable,” he says. The reaction was mixed. “It was a humorous piece, and some of us took it that way.

“But we were also a little angered because of the concerns it raised, primarily about security. We do not want unauthorized people wandering around. We thought about a lawsuit for a while. But we checked to see if Rothman had harassed or troubled anyone, and we found he had been pretty benign.”

In fact, Scruggs said, Rothman’s actions were “not as bold as you might think. If you wandered into a workplace where your mom or brother worked,” it would not be the same as wandering into a place you knew nothing about.

The writer did nail the atmosphere of the place, Scruggs admitted. In New York, “we have 200 people on six floors, all working on different projects for different clients. One person is working for Client A, another for Client B, and there’s a good chance they won’t ever intersect. We have much open office space, with many empty cubicles. If you see a group sitting across the room, you have no reason to interact with them. They might be in from Houston or Chicago.”

In the end, Scruggs said, the idea of a lawsuit was scrapped. Luminant’s main concern was the security issue, “which we acted upon quickly. . . . We took it as a lesson learned, changed our procedures so that the place is now very secure, and we are moving on.”

Has the experience with Rothman led to any changes in procedure at the New Yorker?

“It hasn’t changed procedure so much as it’s heightened our vigilance,” Remnick wrote in an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times last week. “It’s redoubled our effort to ask the extra question, to make even more phone calls than we already do.”