I love and admire the New Yorker; it’s the pinnacle of magazine writing and reporting. But this is what happens when you don’t seem to care whether your hip, star reporters are reporters or corporate shills.

From the Times:

Jonah Lehrer, the staff writer for The New Yorker who apologized in June for recycling his previous work in articles, blogs and his best-selling book “Imagine,” resigned from the magazine, he said in a statement.

Mr. Lehrer faced new questions about his work on Monday in an article in the online magazine Tablet that reported that he had admitted to fabricating quotes attributed to Bob Dylan….

I guarantee you, this won’t be the last shoe to drop in this story.

What’s going on here is larger than the New Yorker, or course: It’s the phenomenon of writers who care about their research and prose only insofar as it gets them speaking gigs, corporate appearances and so on. In other words, it’s another consequence of the Gladwell Effect, a term I coined some years back. (Weirdly, it hasn’t caught on.)

This kind of thing happens when a type of professional feels that society insufficiently appreciates his work for its own merits; in other words, it’s part of the existential crisis of journalism. And so it’s not really surprising to me that this scandal involves someone who writes for the New Yorker’s website. The journalistic values of a media website should be exactly the same as that of a print publication; more often than not, they aren’t—because of the advertising model—how do you get people to actually look at those obnoxious ads—because websites are seen as less fundamental than printed versions, because they’re a training ground for young (read: low-paid) journalists, and because many of the people who write for the web were trained in technology more than journalism….