It's amazing that western civilization managed to get through a bunch of other publishing hoaxes, Janet Cooke, Rich Cohn, Stephen Glass, Michael Finkel and the Epstein kid (Jason, Jacob?) without the internet putting red ants in the doer's underpants. (Yes, I wish the internet had been there for the Vince Foster death in '93, but) the internet has no goddamn sense of proportion.

When are you going to let up on Kaavya? The girl's 19. When has the chick paid enough for her crimes? When does the story, unh, lose its interest? When is your Gotcha gland fully palped? O.K., I agree: maybe Kaavya should make a full confession. Maybe, as a comment-er said to me below, She should give back the money. But is that our business? I'm not sure. Little, Brown has behaved like mensches. Isn't it up to them and Kaavya whether they get the money back?

What's enough? Should we pillory her in Harvard yard? Should we give her a big red P to stitch on her shirt?

Secretly now I'm pulling for Kaavya. Go write a book about what happened, hon. But please—lose the Range Rover, you're destroying the glaciers.

"This is probably my favorite thing to do. Have you ever chopped wood?" said Mr. Finkel, 36, grunting and wielding an ax. "I love it, coming out here in negative-10-degree weather and hacking away. It definitely makes a man out of you." He put the logs away and scampered up a nearby hillside, heading for his favorite meditation spot. "I always fancied myself an outdoorsman, even though I'm a Jewish guy from the East Coast," he said.

In addition to proving his masculine prowess, the slender, bespectacled writer is attempting to smooth over his cracked reputation. In 2001, Mr. Finkel, then 32, was a rising star at The New York Times Magazine, having reported five cover stories in less than two years from locales like Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip and the bowels of a Haitian refugee boat. But after some difficult weeks in West Africa, Mr. Finkel filed a story in which he melded several African workers into one composite character. The Times Magazine ran the piece, "Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?", on Nov. 18, 2001. Mr. Finkel was busted soon after and fired by The Times Magazine's then editor, Adam Moss.

"It was the greatest gig I could ever imagine," recalled Mr. Finkel, squinting into the sun on the hilltop above his 2,500-square-foot log house, shredded Tibetan prayer flags fluttering behind him. "I had no specific beat; I could write at long length; I could go anywhere in the world, to all the hotspots. And it was great exposure in The New York Times Magazine. It was the best job I could imagine. Even now."

Within days of being let go by The Times, Mr. Finkel discovered that he was probably the luckiest fallen journalist in recent memory: He learned that a narcissistic Jehovah's Witness named Christian Longo, wanted for the brutal murder of his wife and three children in Oregon, had been running around Mexico, hiding from the F.B.I.-by impersonating Michael Finkel of The New York Times. After his arrest, Mr. Longo embarked on a period of correspondence with Mr. Finkel, which lasted about a year, through Mr. Longo's trial and eventual death sentence (he remains on death row).

The inevitable book deal accompanied this unlikely series of events. Nine publishing houses were interested in his proposal for True Story, according to Mr. Finkel, which was to recount his disastrous fall from The Times woven with the intrigue of the Longo murder trial. (Mr. Finkel said that the best piece of advice he got from any of his potential editors came from Knopf's "tack-sharp" Sonny Mehta, who told him, "Just tell the story, man. Don't worry about anything else.") Several houses made offers, and Mr. Finkel signed with HarperCollins executive editors David Hirshey and Mark Bryant. (An outside fact-checker was also assigned to the project.) The house paid Mr. Finkel a $425,000 advance; foreign rights, an audio-book deal and a Vanity Fair excerpt brought the total close to $500,000. Mr. Finkel said that DreamWorks had expressed an interest in the film rights, but that he had turned them down.

"I got a great advance on this book," Mr. Finkel said several times over the course of a two-day visit from The Observer. "Fortunately, I'm not hurting for money."

With the book about to come out, complete with an apology to The Times and its readers on the second-to-last page, Mr. Finkel is waiting to see if he will finally have his moment of reconciliation.

Bozeman, Mont., is the sort of town that outdoorsy East Coast folks flee to so they can wait tables and go backcountry skiing in their spare time.

Over a clinking glass of bourbon and ginger ale in a bar called Boodles on Bozeman's Main Street, Mr. Finkel said: "Not to be overly dramatic about it, but I feel like my life is divided into 'before' and 'after.'"

He'd been commissioned to write about slavery on cocoa plantations, but found "extreme poverty" instead of actual slavery in the Ivory Coast in 2001. According to Mr. Finkel, a confluence of factors-the fact that his editor, Ilena Silverman, had been away on maternity leave while he was out in the field, and that the news section of The Times printed a version of the story he had planned to write, combined with the intense stress of trying to write his Times Magazine article-had led him to break the rules. He said that he'd been urged by Ms. Silverman to make his piece "very magazine-y" and to "go literary" by telling the story through the eyes of one boy. He didn't have that story, but he didn't want to disappoint his editors, he said, so he created a composite of the many boys he'd interviewed. The nonprofit Save the Children Canada recognized the mislabeled photo of the African boy and started raising questions. Mr. Finkel was asked to surrender his notebooks to The Times, prompting him to fly to New York and confess. The Times ran an Editor's Note on Feb. 21, 2002, explaining what had happened.

Adam Moss, now editor of New York magazine, declined to comment on Mr. Finkel or his book. The Times Magazine's deputy editor, Katherine Bouton, said: "We were sorry to lose him; we were sorry to see such a promising journalist do such a self-destructive thing. I was also sorry for the tarnish he'd done to the Magazine, but I think we came through it okay."

Ilena Silverman, who'd been Mr. Finkel's editor at The Times Magazine and who is still there, said that the events were far enough in the past that she felt uncomfortable commenting on them in any detail; she said that she couldn't be certain about how many drafts Mr. Finkel had filed or how clearly he'd communicated his problems writing the story.

Ms. Bouton said: "We would never ask someone to make more of a story than the research warranted."

Mr. Finkel said he accepted full responsibility for his actions. "Definitely, there was no implication from my editors anywhere that I should break any rules," he said. "To bend them, perhaps, but not break."

When Mr. Finkel returned to Bozeman, "he was despondent," according to Brett Cline, Mr. Finkel's friend and the owner of his favorite watering hole, Colonel Black's bar. "This was a big blow to his writing career." Mr. Cline qualified his statement by saying that reports characterizing Mr. Finkel as suicidal at the time were overblown, and described his friend as having a "zest for life." "He would be more bummed out if he lost his legs and couldn't ski or mountain-bike anymore," said Mr. Cline.

A former girlfriend, Anne Sherwood, a photojournalist based in Bozeman, said that she and Mr. Finkel were dating at the time of the Stephen Glass scandal at The New Republic in 1998, and that Mr. Finkel had said that "losing his career in such a way would be his worst nightmare."

"Our reaction probably ranged from being very sad for him to being almost something stronger than irritated that he would let this happen to him," said Stephen Byers, the editor at large at National Geographic Adventure, where Mr. Finkel was a contributing editor. "You just thought, 'Jesus God, when you've got Finkel's gift, that shouldn't happen to you.'"

Mr. Finkel said that although he'd been profoundly depressed, part of him wanted a respite from the endless airplane trips and crushing insecurity that had him terrified of filing a less-than-perfect piece of copy and blowing his career. He said he always thought about the thousands of other writers who were surely lined up to take his place at one of the best journalism outlets in the country.

"I was working so hard, and suddenly there was a sense of relief: 'Phew! I don't have to write any more New York Times stories,'" said Mr. Finkel. "It's sort of weird to say."

The Times investigated Mr. Finkel's other magazine pieces. Ms. Bouton said that "it was a magazine-wide project for a brief period" and that, save for a few small factual glitches, everything had come out clean. ( The Times Magazine also changed its policy and now requires that reporters submit notebooks for fact-checking.) National Geographic Adventure re-examined his previous features for them, too, and was satisfied.

Mr. Finkel clearly relished his work-hard/play-hard persona and characterized himself, without irony, as a "risk-taker." When asked whether he'd ever been tempted to take liberties with facts on previous assignments, Mr. Finkel thought hard.

"You know," he said, "there were times when I'd come back from assignment, where I'd be like, 'Ah, I wish that this person had said this,' or 'I wish that I was a fiction writer.' But no-I mean, I was always scrupulously fact-checked. For the most part, I wasn't writing about people without telephones, you know? The thought didn't really enter my mind, 'cause it wasn't even a possibility. It was like, they're just gonna call them up anyway. You'd be a fool to do that. However, I definitely have a creative streak in me where I'd be like, 'I wish it had turned out differently, or-if I was writing fiction-I would do it this way.' But no-no real temptations.

"I'm not saying this to exonerate myself or anything," he continued. "But it would sort of be interesting if 10 writers were picked at random, if their work was gone over with a fine-toothed comb-I wonder what the result would be."

One source who had worked with Mr. Finkel in the magazine world suggested that his lack of conventional training meant that perhaps he'd never learned the rules of news reporting. All this might have been compensated for, in a way, by the fact that he was an excellent writer and was willing to perform just about any stunt to get his story.

"Being able to write this book and focus on one thing changed my life for the better," said Mr. Finkel. "It was calming; it allowed me to actually date a woman for real and get engaged and get married. I think that nothing has to go at a million miles an hour. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it matured me. Probably about fucking time. It took me 30 years to become mature."

Michael Finkel spent most of his youth in Stamford, Conn., with his sister and parents. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, majored in economics and contemplated becoming a banker before taking a job at Skiing magazine in New York instead. He got an assignment to live in Montana as a ski bum for a season. He decided to move permanently to Bozeman and freelanced for Skiing, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly and others. He became known for filing long, colorful first-person narratives from obscure corners of the earth.

Mr. Byers described Mr. Finkel as "enormously ballsy and a terrific athlete," and said that one assignment for the magazine-to ride down the Chinko river in Central African Republic-had been turned down by more experienced writers with safety concerns about the country's political instability. Since the Times debacle, Mr. Finkel has only accepted a handful of magazine assignments-for publications including Men's Journal and Backpacker. One feature about a mountain-climbing expedition with his sister that had already been reported at the time of the Times correction appeared in National Geographic Adventure in November 2002, although the magazine said it would gladly have him write for them again.

"Would I be concerned about assigning Finkel a story that required that we trust the writer? I don't think I would be, but it'd always be there in the back of your mind," said Mr. Byers. "I've got a long history with Finkel, and it's more of a visceral thing rather than that I've looked at all the facts, and I decided on the basis of those facts that I would trust him."

Most of True Story was written in Mr. Finkel's office in Bozeman, a former janitor's closet in a converted schoolhouse, which he rents for about $25 a month. He burns candles and wears billowy earth-toned drawstring pants acquired in Afghanistan or Thailand when he writes. On one wall is a string of snapshots lined up like trophies.

"I think I look like Hunter Thompson in that one," said Mr. Finkel, pointing to a shot of his unshaven self wearing mirrored sunglasses and engaged in some sort of " right on!" gesture with a Korean mountain climber in the Himalayas.

"That was right after I was attacked by a swarm of African killer bees," said Mr. Finkel, indicating a close-up of his swollen red chest, taken while on the rafting trip through the Central African Republic.

"I spent 12 years traveling more than six months a year," he continued. "I really needed to see the world. It was always Third World-it was hot, buggy. I got malaria. I was arrested [working on a story about] Haiti and had a gun put to my head in various sundry places."

Writing a book forced Mr. Finkel to stay close to home for the first time in a decade. He now drives around in his white pickup truck, plays ice hockey and enjoys "brown liquors" (according to his friend Mr. Cline).

"Luckily, I'm a marathon runner. Actually, I'm an ultra- marathon runner," said Mr. Finkel. "Not to brag, but a person cannot run 100 miles-but you can run one mile 100 times consecutively. So I wrote a book, one page at a time."

True Story is in fact a riveting read. Mr. Finkel's own travails and self-analysis are elegantly woven with those of his mass-murderer subject, suggesting that writing books might actually suit him. And so far, according to those involved with the book as well as the editors at The New York Times Magazine, the version of history it presents seems to be checking out. But all of the introspection still hasn't completely cured Mr. Finkel of his all-too-human ability to fudge a little under pressure. When initially asked about his advance by The Observer, Mr. Finkel fidgeted and then said that he'd received "around $300,000," adding that it was "massively generous for a writer." The following day, when asked about the higher number ($500,000) that he'd disclosed to a friend, Mr. Finkel said he'd been intentionally "opaque" so as to appear modest.

"Of course I wasn't being straight with you!" said Mr. Finkel. "There's a difference between lying and not being straight. I feel like John Kerry here."

That's been the question facing newsrooms around the world for months as they considered their correspondents in Iraq's targeted capital, Baghdad. And those deliberations reached a fever pitch on March 18, a day after George W. Bush's 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein and his stern warning to journalists and U.N. weapons inspectors to leave the city immediately.

Many news organizations were already pulling out by the weekend, sensing the acceleration of the American invasion. The New York Times has left, as has ABC News, NBC News, US News & World Report , Time and numerous others. But as of late Tuesday, a handful of U.S. media operations still had staff in Baghdad, among them MSNBC, CBS, News-week and CNN.

The remaining journalists include seasoned veterans. MSNBC and NBC will be relying on Peter Arnett, one of CNN's correspondents during the bombing of Baghdad 12 years ago who is in Iraq on assignment from National Geographic Explorer. ABC will use the services of freelancer Richard Engel. CNN's correspondents are Rym Brahimi and Nic Robertson, the latter of whom was in the capital in 1991.

"It's our intention to keep them there," CNN spokeswoman Krista Robinson said. "We're committed to our journalists and committed to covering the story so long as we feel it's safe."

Given that the U.S. attack upon Baghdad is expected to be exponentially more powerful than the first, no news organization with people there was taking decisions about its correspondents lightly. Cross-continent phone conversations about staying or going were continuous throughout Tuesday, with the possibility that any remaining correspondent could evacuate at any minute.

As of late Tuesday, CBS had correspondent Lara Longan and four other staffers in Baghdad. "Lara is in Baghdad at the moment," said CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. "But the conversations are continuous about the near future."

But Newsweek seemed anxious to pull its correspondent, Melinda Liu.

"We have asked her to leave as long as it's safe to leave," said a spokesman for the magazine.

Among the organizations that had already pulled out, there was some understandable competitive angst over whether competitors who'd stayed behind would get an important story. But those who made the decision to pull people out felt it was the prudent move, and not a hard one to make.

"Given what we've seen the past few months," said U.S. News & World Report editor Brian Duffy, "Baghdad will be a dangerous place to be."

Time managing editor Jim Kelly, agreed, "Saddam Hussein sees this as a war for his very survival." Mr. Kelly said, "That wasn't clear in 1991. I have to assume Saddam Hussein will fight more fiercely than he did in 1991. Some reporters might be willing, but I can't afford to take that chance. Had we had the opportunity in 1991, we might have done it then. Now it seems too dangerous."

Mr. Kelly added that Time 's publication schedule played some role in his decision to keep staff out.

"We are a weekly newsmagazine," he said. "We're not a television network or a daily newspaper. People aren't looking to us for minute-by-minute updates."

Some magazines will be working with freelance contributors who have chosen to remain. Mr. Kelly said that Time has no staff in Baghdad, but does have access to an individual who plants to take photographs and deliver some reporting for the magazine.

There is the possibility, of course, that some reporters may eventually find their way into a Baghdad conflict-alongside U.S. troops. There are hundreds of print and television correspondents "embedded" within the U.S. military, and it's likely that at least some of them will see action.

But even those who don't make it to Baghdad have a responsibility to provide objective insight into the military's actions.

"They've been welcomed inside the tent," said Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Barney Calame. "But we have to make sure they're objective in their reporting."

Mr. Calame went on to say that he envisioned a day when The Journal , which has no reporters in Baghdad, would report from the Iraqi capital city.

"Eventually, stability will come back to the city and to the region," Mr. Calame said. "Whether it is three weeks or nine weeks-who knows? But like Hanoi or Saigon or Beirut, no matter what type of government it has in the future, we would like to be there."

But that still seems a far way off. For editors and reporters, the next few days will see them put into practice what's been rehearsed and theorized in newsrooms and training camps for several months.

"It's something we've prepared for for so long," New York Times reporter David Sanger said. As President Bush gave his ultimatum, Mr. Sanger said, "You almost couldn't detect the shifting of gears."

Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham said the mood in his office was "quite somber."

"There's no bloodlust around here," Mr. Meacham said. "People are much more concerned than they are viewing this as a great adventure. That's just not happening. That's out of the movies; this is real life."

"There's no more important story for a news organization than the debate about going to war, going to war and the aftermath of that war," Mr. Meacham continued. "You bring all the assets you can bring in a story like this."

Said Mr. Kelly: "I feel like we've been living in this historic moment now for months."

In a stunning February 2002 editor's note, The New York Times revealed that the young African laborer profiled in a Times Magazine piece by contributor Michael Finkel didn't really exist, and was instead a composite of several young men the author met on the Ivory Coast.

While this kind of fabrication usually leads one to the professional gulag with Janet Cooke and Stephen Glass, Mr. Finkel has managed to find new work-this time on a book whose treatment reads like a cross between In Cold Blood and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind . Purchased by HarperCollins and called True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa , Mr. Finkel interweaves the story of his Times Magazine deception with the story of Christian Longo, an Oregon man who's been accused of murdering his wife and three children and then fleeing to Mexico, where he assumed the identity of one "Michael Finkel of The New York Times ."

Mr. Finkel learned of the identity theft the night before Mr. Raines' note was published in The Times , and his proposal outlines a book that alternates between the two men's stories. Eventually, the two come together after they start corresponding and Mr. Finkel visits Mr. Longo in jail.

"The two stories will start to twine together in the latter chapters," Mr. Finkel told Off the Record from Oregon, where he's attending Mr. Longo's trial. "I'm envisioning a shape [like] a martini glass, where two things start out far apart … on either end and then end up together.

"I definitely do not want to compare the two crimes , for lack of a better word-a murder and a piece of failed journalism," Mr. Finkel added. "But events in our lives, on some level, are parallel. The situations were extremely pressure-filled. That's not to say I pity him, but I think I have more empathy for him having gotten thrown out of The New York Times ."

In his proposal, Mr. Finkel describes an earnest attempt to get a factual story for The Times Magazine , the amphetamine habit he developed while working on the piece, and the "unhealthy relationship" he had with his editor, Ilena Silverman, who he said pushed him to tell the story through the experiences of one boy. Ms. Silverman did not return a call seeking comment, and Times Magazine editor Adam Moss declined to comment.

When asked about the irony of fabricating a piece of journalism and using the story of that fabrication as the basis for another piece of journalism, Mr. Finkel said: "Listen, I made a very big mistake, and I was punished. It wasn't my intention to write a book. It was a story I felt like writing for myself, but ended up turning into a book."

Mr. Finkel added that The Times and others had checked through his previous stories and found them free of factual indiscretions.

"I'm still a working journalist," Mr. Finkel said. "I just happen to be one who made a big mistake."

"We were suspicious," Mr. Moss said, "but we believed there might be an explanation of what had happened." Then, he said, "the story just got darker and darker as we went along."

On Wednesday, Feb. 13, Mr. Finkel called his editor at the magazine, Ilena Silverman, to tell her that he'd spoken with a representative from Save the Children Canada, a relief organization mentioned in his story, who said the group had found Youssouf Male and he was not the boy pictured in the magazine, in a photograph credited to Mr. Finkel himself.

At that point, Mr. Finkel made an excuse, Mr. Moss said, and told The Times that he had accidentally sent in the wrong photograph and a correction was needed. But Mr. Finkel's call set off alarm bells at the magazine, and that day Mr. Moss asked his deputy editor, Katherine Bouton, to begin investigating the reporter's piece in its entirety.

Mr. Moss asked Mr. Finkel for corroboration of Youssouf Male's existence, but instead, the next day, the writer hopped on a plane from Bozeman, Mont., where he lives, to New York to meet with The Times ' editors on Friday, Feb. 15.

Mr. Finkel met with Ms. Bouton first, and in their lengthy meeting admitted that he had written about a composite character-but, he insisted, based on facts gleaned from his reporting in West Africa. After that meeting, Ms. Bouton told Mr. Finkel to walk around Times Square for a bit while she briefed Mr. Moss, who then sat down with his writer.

Mr. Moss was furious.

"It was some mix of anger-fury, I would even say," the editor said. "Here is a guy with a tremendous amount of talent, and it was just such a stupid thing to do. And at some level, even though you were furious with him, you couldn't help but feel sorry for him."

Mr. Moss said he asked Mr. Finkel "to explain in his own words what he had done and then asked him why." After the writer complied, The Times responded by terminating his contract, and by publishing a contrite Editor's Note on Feb. 21.

Mr. Finkel declined to speak with Off the Record, but he did send an e-mail explaining his silence. "As you can imagine it has been a difficult week," he wrote. "I have been doing a great deal of thinking, and I've decided to take some time before commenting further about the situation. Eventually, I plan to write about the experience myself."

Mr. Finkel also sent along a statement that read, in part: "In order to tell this story in a way that is compelling to read, I made the wrong decision to put together several accounts that were told to me by these young workers and combined them into one representative voice …. The situation that I portray-that of young boys living in an impoverished part of the world who sell themselves to traffickers in order to have the opportunity to work for pennies a day on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast-is absolutely true."

But Mr. Finkel didn't offer any insight as to why he chose to do what he did.

One of Mr. Finkel's closest friends and working colleagues, however, summed up what Mr. Finkel had told him. Photographer Chris Anderson, who traveled with Mr. Finkel on numerous assignments over the last four years, including the trip to West Africa, said that Mr. Finkel probably erred due to stress. Under the pressure of writing for the biggest venue of his career-before landing a Times Magazine contract, Mr. Finkel's primary outlets were National Geographic Adventure and Skiing magazine-Mr. Finkel buckled, he said.

What really put the pressure on, Mr. Anderson said, was the fact that the West Africa story hadn't panned out as Mr. Finkel thought it might. "From the get-go, it was like a busted play," Mr. Anderson said.

Originally, he said, Mr. Finkel was setting out to document the use of child slavery on cocoa farms. But when the two arrived, they both began to have their doubts that the young men they met had ever been slaves. The conditions were harsh, to be sure, but Mr. Anderson said they were resistant to the slavery label that several aid organizations in the region were using. "We started finding that the story was that there wasn't a story," Mr. Anderson said.

After a couple of weeks of reporting in June and July of last year, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Finkel had a lot of trouble writing. Mr. Anderson said Mr. Finkel went through a lot of drafts. To compensate for the lack of a hard child-slavery angle, Mr. Anderson said, The Times editors wanted Mr. Finkel to "try to make it more personal, more human, so Mike tried to do that and wrote a couple more drafts, and they were all rejected for one reason or another."

Mr. Finkel was getting frustrated, and also had a looming self-imposed deadline: At the end of the summer, he had planned to climb a mountain in Nepal.

"When he finally cracked," Mr. Anderson said, "I don't know how long he had been awake, but this had been weeks of rewriting and I don't how many drafts he had written, but finally he had been awake for literally three days straight; he had not slept."

Mr. Moss said that Mr. Finkel told him the story that ran was actually a draft he'd written as an exercise, to put down on paper what he wanted to write-but, Mr. Moss added, after a positive reaction from his editor, Mr. Finkel never told anyone at the magazine that it wasn't true.

Mr. Finkel did go to Nepal, and Mr. Anderson said that during his friend's time there, Mr. Finkel was completely out of contact with The Times . He claimed Mr. Finkel was so remote that he didn't hear about the attack on the World Trade Center until days afterward. When he returned from Nepal, Mr. Anderson said they expected the piece, like lots of others after Sept. 11, would be spiked. And soon after Mr. Finkel returned, the two left for eight weeks in Afghanistan.

While he was gone, however, the Youssouf Male piece was put back on the magazine's schedule. It closed during the first week of November, and Mr. Moss said that his magazine's fact-checkers had trouble verifying the piece. There are only three full names in Mr. Finkel's piece, and Youssouf Male, the main character, was unreachable.

One of the other named individuals was a psychologist, Ibrahim Haidara, who had worked at Save the Children's center for child laborers in Sikasso, Mali. In the piece, Mr. Haidara counsels Mr. Finkel's composite character, Youssouf Male; in reality, Mr. Haidara couldn't recollect interacting with Mr. Male when he visited the center. It was the simple fact-checking call that could have raised questions before the piece was published, but as Mr. Moss explained, a language barrier-Mr. Haidara speaks French and not much English-and an e-mail snafu kept them out of touch.

A fact-checker did try to reach Mr. Haidara, who was fired by Save the Children at the end of August, but, Mr. Moss said, she only received a rather garbled response in broken English. As The Times Magazine read it, he was upset about his dismissal and wasn't going to answer any questions about Youssouf Male. Mr. Moss, who said he has French speakers on his staff, said the magazine left it at that.

"We felt satisfied that the communication in English was going through on both sides and we were not going to be able to get a lot of information from him," Mr. Moss said. "In retrospect, we should have pursued this more aggressively."

Off the Record called Mr. Haidara in Paris, where he currently lives. In an interview conducted in French, Mr. Haidara said he saw problems with the story of Youssouf Male when he read Mr. Finkel's piece in English.

"I think he added another child. I don't really believe it," Mr. Haidara said, pointing to details in the story that were inconsistent with his work in Sikasso. For instance, Mr. Finkel wrote that Mr. Haidara taught Youssouf Male to sing the Malian national anthem. "You don't teach things like that to children. Even I don't know it by heart," he said.

Mr. Haidara, in fact, said he sent another e-mail to the Times fact-checker about inaccuracies the day after the story was published. But Mr. Moss said because the fact-checker who received the e-mail was a freelance fact-checker and hadn't been in the office since, no one was monitoring her e-mail account, and Mr. Haidara's e-mail went unnoticed until Mr. Moss ordered the new investigation.

Mr. Moss said that the editors went on trust with their writer: "And, you know, that trust turned out to be misplaced."

In the days after The Times acknowledged Mr. Finkel's mistake, Mr. Anderson said he'd been consoling his friend. He has fielded several teary, late-night calls from Mr. Finkel, he said. "Obviously he's shattered in many ways, extremely remorseful. He's hurting."

So far, The New York Times ' leadership has been content to let the Michael Finkel episode pass as an event confined to its magazine section. Mr. Moss said he alerted executive editor Howell Raines as soon as he got out of his meeting with Mr. Finkel on Feb. 15.

The controversy over Mr. Finkel's piece comes at a time when rumors about section editors like Mr. Moss being shuffled had already been swirling.

Times sources tell Off the Record that prior to the Finkel episode, Mr. Raines had spoken to Mr. Moss about taking a job where he would oversee The Times ' feature sections like Dining In–Dining Out and House and Home, but Mr. Moss resisted the move. The Finkel episode, Times sources said, may force the issue.

Mr. Moss said: "My conversations with Howell are between he and I."

A request for comment from Mr. Raines was referred to Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who rebuffed the suggestion that Mr. Moss' stock may have been damaged by the Finkel incident.

"To the contrary, I think this reflects very highly on Adam Moss," Mr. Boyd said. "He did what we expect of any section editor: He spotted the problem, he investigated it, and he put us down the road of fixing it."

Asked to comment about the possibility of Mr. Moss leaving the magazine for a features-editing post, Mr. Boyd said, "Nope."

-Gabriel Snyder, with reporting by Elisabeth Franck