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New Yorker magazine presented a National Magazine Award it won for an article on the Japanese “rental family” industry, the first return of an award in 55 years of history from the highest honor of magazine industry.
The 2019 Feature Film Writing Award went to the New Yorker and writer Elif Batuman for the April 2018 article, which described two people who said they were clients of a Tokyo-based service called Family Romance. . One said he was a lonely widower who hired actresses through the company to play the part of a wife and girl, and the other said she was a single mother hiring a replacement father for her daughter.
In a December 2020 editor’s note added to the online version of the article, the New Yorker said the two purported clients were in fact married. The woman appears to be married to the owner of Family Romance, the note says. The findings on the three people, which follow an internal New Yorker investigation, “largely undermine the credibility of what they told us,” the note said.
David Remnick, shown in 2017, is the New Yorker’s longtime editor.
The American Society of Magazine Editors, which sponsors the National Magazine Awards in association with Columbia University’s School of Journalism, said in a statement that The New Yorker has decided to return its award. The company said Ms Batuman’s sources had deceived her, and she said she “commended the New Yorker for investigating the story.”
Sid Holt, executive director of the magazine company, first told the Washington Post that he didn’t think the issues with the article would lead to the price being reconsidered.
In an email to the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Mr Holt said it was the first time an award recipient has returned the award since the National Magazine Awards began in 1966.
Earlier this month, the Journal reported that Ms Batuman had expressed concern to people she consulted prior to publication about the veracity of her sources. A spokeswoman for the New Yorker said at the time, “Like any good reporter, Elif came to this story with appropriate skepticism” and his job was to “invite criticism from others.”
The New Yorker spokeswoman declined to comment further on Monday. The magazine retained the original article on its website under editor’s note. Ms Batuman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. The magazine is owned by Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications Inc.
People who have dealt with Family Romance have said that some of its services are real, but the people its owner has introduced to the media as clients were often actors themselves.
Ryuichi Ichinokawa, who runs a business competing with Family Romance and who was quoted in the New Yorker article, said he wanted all incorrect parts of the article to be removed. “What I would love to see most is that they turn it into a real article based purely on the facts,” he said.
Write to Peter Landers at [email protected] and Chieko Tsuneoka at [email protected]
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