Press Release AIPR - The Stephen Glass Archive…

In the spring of 1998, Stephen Glass was an associate editor at The New Republic and a nationally recognized up-and-coming journalist, having contributed pieces to Harper's Magazine, Slate and Rolling Stone. But one of his stories, "Hack Heaven," caught the eye of one of Forbes.com's staff reporters, Adam Penenberg, as being too good to be true.

By Michael Noer, Forbes Magazine, Online Edition In the spring of 1998, Stephen Glass was an associate editor at The New Republic and a nationally recognized up-and-coming journalist, having contributed pieces to Harper's Magazine, Slate and Rolling Stone. But one of his stories, "Hack Heaven," caught the eye of one of Forbes.com's staff reporters, Adam Penenberg, as being too good to be true. The piece, which supposedly detailed the exploits of a 15-year-old hacker blackmailing a software company by the unlikely name of Jukt Micronics, was pure fiction. Penenberg and then-Managing Editor Kambiz Foroohar were able to prove, among other things, that Jukt Micronics didn't exist and neither did the hacker. The New Republic subsequently fired Glass and fabrications were eventually found, or suspected, in a large portion of his work. The discovery was a major scoop for our fledgling Web site, which had only begun publishing original online content a year earlier. The resulting pieces went a long way toward establishing the legitimacy of what was then deemed "new media," which many "old media" types ironically suspected of being riddled with errors. In 2003, Lion's Gate Films released a critically-acclaimed movie, Shattered Glass, based upon the events behind the stories. Glass' actions--and those of other disgraced journalists, like New York Times reporter Jayson Blair--have contributed significantly to the continued erosion of public trust in the media. For our special report on "Trust," we felt we should package together our old stories on Stephen Glass--including a link to a review of his latest work, a novel titled The Fabulist--in one convenient place. Read also Online journalism comes of age By Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes Magazine, Online Edition One of the biggest stories of the year 1998 for Forbes Digital Tool began with the simple question, "Why didn't we have this?" "This" referred to a story entitled "Hack Heaven," which appeared in the May 18 issue of the New Republic. In short, the piece was a fascinating look inside the hacker world, where, according to the writer, Stephen Glass, computer-savvy teenagers were extorting money from corporations, even hiring agents to broker million-dollar deals. What a scoop, we thought. Why hadn't we heard of this? Come to think of it, we also couldn't figure out why we hadn't heard of any of the companies, individuals or government agencies mentioned in the story either. So we got cracking. After two and a half days of solid research, we couldn't confirm one fact. This prompted us to contact Charles Lane , the New Republic's top editor, and fill him in on our findings. Two days later, Lane fired Stephen Glass. For an online publication, the Glass story was quite a coup. Long snubbed by our print brethren, online journalists were told that we were slaves to the 24-hour news cycle, that these intense deadlines would force us to rush material into print without checking it out. Of course, they could have said the same thing about wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters. But now it was an online publication that had busted a print publication for committing a cardinal sin in journalism: fabricating a story. Later, of course, it would be discovered that Glass had faked more than one story. In fact, dozens, for venerable print publications like Harper's, Rolling Stone, George and the New Republic. What happened after Glass's almost sociopathic bent for fictionalizing was truly bizarre, as he dropped off the face of the earth and went into hiding. Shortly after our Glass expo-appeared, two columnists from the Boston Globe--Patricia Smith, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and the raspy-prosed Mike Barnicle-- were forced to resign when it became known they too had been trying to pass off fiction as fact in their columns. There was also the CNN/Time fiasco, when the two combined to televise an unsubstantiated report on the U.S. military. Then Forbes Digital weighed in with another piece we called "Phantom Mobsters," this time debunking an over-hyped story on the mob getting into high tech scams that appeared in the New York Post. All in all, it was a busy year for corrections. What does this say about the state of online journalism? Probably not a whole lot. But it does go to show that it doesn't matter whether a journalist works in TV, print or online. Solid reporting is solid reporting, whatever the medium.