| |
| | The Great Pretender? |
 | | 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. |
| www.newyorkmetro.com /nymetro/news/media/features/5740 (549 words) |
|