Jayson Blair: The full story

On 2 May, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned after it became clear he had copied huge chunks of another newspaper's story in his own.

Over a fortnight later and still it's news. Clearly, this is one of those occasions that will go down in history as a reference.

Mr Blair was fired after some rooting about by traditional rival paper The Washington Post showed he had been copying other reporters' work in his own stories.

However, it soon became clear that he had indulged in far more than a touch of plagarism: he said he was places he wasn't, spoke to people his didn't, generally made it up as he went along. His writing however was pretty good.

The big bang came though when the New York Times published an extraordinary 7,500 piece on Blair and his errors on 11 May. With hindsight, this may have been a major error, although there is no doubt at the time that the newspaper thought a mediaeval-style bleeding would get the poison out the body faster.

It has since set up on the Internet a FULL listing of every single story Blair wrote for the paper. It has also gone into excruciating detail over errors made by Blair.

Since then we have had a relentles hounding of Blair by the media. People have been asked to resign. We have had the usual accusations of drug-taking and general bad behaviour. And, as seems usual in America in these cases, some extremely dodgy and bad reporting and commentary about race.

Purpose of this site

This site, you will note, still has very little on it. This is due to the fact that the whole saga is still ongoing and Blair has only just started talking. It may not fit into the exciting news hunting hole but the idea for this site is that it provides a historical and objective account of the whole thing: what happened, why, when, what implications, links to source material etc etc.

It won't be dull however, because I, this site's owner, haven't learnt how to write dull yet. That takes about 15 years of daily reporting experience to achieve.

It will be a tale of newspapers, lies, scandal, and the stories that Blair wrote. Hypocritical, vicious journalists. Extremely peculiar race relations. Pomposity, arrogance, stupidity. Laziness, ignorance, apathy. Balls, bluster, bathos. And that's just the New York Times.

What did Blair actually do? And why have people reacted the way they have? How did he get away with it? Is there a lesson to be learnt? Did he simply jump the gun in producing entertaining rather than completely true news stories? Hopefully, this site will get around to answering those questions.

But there is an awful lot of stuff to read and chew over so the site may take a while.

Who is Jayson Blair?

The South Asian Journalists Association had this on him on its website (which it very very quickly pulled as soon as the revelations came out).

"JAYSON BLAIR is a business reporter who covers media and technology in the New York region. In that position, he covers some of the nation's largest local media companies and New York's Silicon Alley. He has written extensively on the rise and fall of many New York Internet companies and the resulting impacts, from the failure of Urbanfetch.com to an exclusive report on apparent stock manipulation involving Fashionmall.com.

"Mr. Blair began working at The Times in 1999 and has covered a wide range of topics central to the region, including real estate, economics, law enforcement and government. He was a key member of a six-month investigation into potential corruption and mismanagement in the New York City Buildings Department that led to indictments, an ongoing grand jury investigation and the resignations of several officials.

"Mr. Blair started his career at a community newspaper in Northern Virginia, and has worked at The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where an examination of the Massachusetts' sexual predator laws led to an overhaul of the statues regarding community notification of sexual offenders. He was hired as one of the youngest reporters at The Times in decades.

"He studied journalism and history at the University of Maryland, and attended post-graduate programs at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the Wharton School of Business.

"Mr. Blair lives in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn."

Why is there only one picture of him in existence?

Well, Newsweek has got a few more. Please feel free to send me any different pictures of him.

As for the story, if you want to read more at the moment, check out The Washington Post - its first story is here.

Or a Google news search on our Jayson.

In the meantime, I can also thoroughly recommended you visit the finest satire site on the Internet - The Rockall Times.

If anyone wants to send me some interesting info - that means not something I can easily pick up from other newspapers - or if Mr Blair would like to get in touch (no hounding here), please email me at kieren@jaysonblair.com.

More later

Kieren