MIKE FINKEL’S TRUE STORY

“Sometimes—pretty much all the time—I wish that parts of this story weren’t true, but the whole thing is.”

Mike Finkel, former contributing editor for the New York Times Magazine and current freelance writer with two major articles in recent issues of National Geographic, reads from his 2005 book True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa and talks about writing and journalistic ethics.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6

7:30 P.M.

TEACHING-LEARNING CENTER 040, UI COMMONS

About Mike Finkel:

From Brandon Schrand (UI English):

Thanks to the efforts of our own inestimable Gary Williams, UI’s Distinguished Humanities Professor, author Mike Finkel will visit the University of Idaho on Wednesday, February 6^th, and will be reading at 7:30 PM in TLC 040. Sponsored by the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Distinguished Humanities Professor Endowment, the event is free and open to the public.

Finkel has written an article for National Geographic on Malaria, a disease he contracted in Thailand. The article is of special interest as it combines both science and humanities as a way to make an otherwise inaccessible subject matter accessible. For more on the article, click here.

Mike Finkel gained nationwide attention as a reporter for the New York Times when he fabricated parts of an article he had written about child laborers in Africa. Finkel was caught and fired only to discover that, at the same time, a mass murderer had been living under an assumed identity: Michael Finkel of the New York Times. The extraordinary account of stolen identity and redemption is documented in his memoir, True Story: Murder, Mayhem, Mea Culpa.  

·         The New York Magazine. Published Feb 25, 2002

Retrieved from http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/5740/

The Great Pretender?

·         By Robert Kolker

His methods were, to say the least, unorthodox, and far from Timesian: spending hours with sources without a notebook, writing epic-length articles with barely a quotation in them. But Michael Finkel knew how to tell a story, and he told some great ones for The New York Times Magazine -- until last week, in an unprecedented editors' note, the paper revealed that the title character of his November 18 story, "Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?," was actually a composite of several young men. Finkel, 33, was fired, leaving some to wonder if the Times had been too taken with his (too-hard-to-check) articles from such far-flung locales as the Ivory Coast, Gaza, and Haiti, where he famously had to be rescued from a refugee boat.

Reached at home in Montana, Finkel is shaky and glum ("My career is on the line," he says) and, yes, defiant, casting himself less as a Stephen Glass master of invention than as an overreaching artist who dared to touch the sun and got singed. "It's an isolated incident, without question a wrong decision," he says. "I hope readers know that this was an attempt to reach higher -- to make something beautiful, frankly. In the article, there's no question of the quality of reporting, just in the journalistic techniques employed."

How can the quality and the accuracy be unrelated? "In my writing," Finkel explains, "I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism -- accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet -- with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence." This time, though, literary seemed to trump journalism. "Look, I wrote a 6,000-word story without a single quote, without a blink in the shift of tone and pace. It was an ambitious attempt. I slipped. It deserved a correction. But there is a great deal of accuracy. Not once has the prose been called into question."

He's prepared to fall on his sword -- "The magazine had to do what they had to do. I would have done it to myself" -- but he's not about to forget what he did for them. "I put my life on the line for the Times -- off of Haiti, in the line of fire in Gaza, in Afghanistan." His own story, he says, is just beginning. "Not to get too maudlin, but I think all mistakes are tests for one's mettle.

"I am a writer. It's like a third arm to me. My first reaction to all of this was to write about it. I've filled up pages in my journal about it. I'm going to write about you."