Michael Finkel

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Michael Finkel is an American journalist and memoirist.

He wrote for the New York Times until 2001, when he was discovered to have created composite characters for a story he had written on the African slave trade, and fired. (In contrast with the major attention given to the plagiarism by his NYT colleague Jayson Blair in the next week, his dismissal was announced with a short paragraph in a back section of the Times.)

He learned that Christian Longo, an Oregon man who had murdered his own wife and children in December 2001, had used "Michael Finkel" as an alias during his several weeks as a fugitive. After Longo's capture the next month, they communicated. Finkel says that before Longo's trial, he had hoped that the journalist would bring out "the real story" to help him win acquittal; after conviction, the convict gave Finkel interviews admitting his guilt. (In 2013, filming began for True Story, a feature film based on Finkel's memoir about the case, in which a character, played by Jonah Hill, is based on Finkel, and James Franco plays Longo.)^[1]

In 2008 he and John Stanmeyer won the National Magazine Award for photojournalism, on the basis of "Bedlam in the Blood: Malaria", published in National Geographic.

References

↑ Nicholson, Max. "Hill, Franco Join Pitt for True Story – Movies News at IGN". Movies.ign.com. Retrieved February 2, 2014.

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