Impressively, Seth Mnookin ’94 has turned a New York Times plagiarism scandal into riveting reading for those outside the insular world of journalism. Though the falsification of articles might not seem the stuff of riveting reading, Mnookin’s debut book, Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, is not only highly informative but also surprisingly entertaining to those unschooled in the nuances of newspapers.

Mnookin talked and answered questions about his debut book at the Harvard Coop on Wednesday, in front of a packed audience. “It gets more and more nervewracking every time I read, because I know more people” he said, noting the presence of many of his family members in the audience from his native Newton.

At the event, Mnookin read a passage from his book and answered questions about the inner workings of the Times as well as the current state of journalism in general.

Hard News is the story of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times in the spring of 2003 and its crippling effect on the nation’s most well-respected newspaper. Blair—under the tutelage of top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, who were ousted from the paper in the scandal’s wake—fictionalized large segments of many stories, including those on the front page; he often didn’t even visit locations, culling colorful details about locations from others’ articles.

Even with a shoddy journalistic record at the Times and his college and high school papers, Blair continued to be assigned high profile stories, including the Washington D.C. sniper case of late 2002. In this, one of the most important stories of his career, Blair attributed to numerous “anonymous” sources claims that were later refuted by law enforcement officials. In a less high-profile case, Blair’s colorful details eventually did him in, when a reporter from a regional newspaper noticed that Blair’s quotations about the home of the mother of a missing soldier in Iraq followed her own almost exactly.

Hard News uses the Blair scandal as the launching point of a broader examination of the workings of the Times, particuarly focusing on the rise and fall of Raines. As the executive editor of the Times from days before Sept. 11, 2001 to weeks after the Blair scandal first broke, Raines steered the paper to an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes in 2002 for its coverage of the 9/11 attacks. But his combative demeanor and favoritism, eclipsed by the paper’s success in the aftermath of Sept. 11, became his Achilles’ heel in the Blair case and eventually led to his termination.

The book goes beyond the modern politics of the Times and details its history as the nation’s first major objective news source. “The Times,” Mnookin writes, “is like Harvard or the New York Yankees. It so dominates our imagination that it has become an archetype of what it means to be a journalistic enterprise.”

Mnookin, 32, writes with an intense narrative drive and exactitude that makes the book riveting even for non-journalism junkies. Hard News is divided into three sections—“Before,” “Spring 2003” and “After”—and individual chapters within these sections begin with detailed individual narratives that are later linked to the broader plot. Though these transitions can at times seem too temporally driven—most of them begin with dates and their corresponding events—they do the trick, and keep the reader hooked in a story with tiny but salient details, such as the physical appearance of a particular reporter, or the layout of the Times’ cafeteria.

Mnookin wrote the book in about a year, though he says this was only possible because of his previous coverage and extensive notes culled from reporting on the scandal for Newsweek. “I didn’t need to start from scratch,” he says, “there was a lot I could build on right away.”

He adds, however, “if it were a standing start I couldn’t have done it in a year.”

In fact, expanding his journalism on the story into a full-fledged book didn’t initially appeal to Mnookin. “I wasn’t convinced [it] would be a great book,” he says, “because I thought people who were interested in [the story] had probably already heard and read” everything about it.

The idea of expanding his articles into what would become Hard News became more interesting to him, however, when he began looking at the bigger picture. “I started thinking about some of the larger issues that this brought out, including the relentless pressure on news organizations to increase their profits,” he says. He was also inspired by the appeal of famous newspaper stories that had become incredible yarns to non-media junkies, most notably All the President’s Men.

To Mnookin, the appeal of the Woodward and Bernstein story, and the more recent film Shattered Glass, about The New Republic journalist Stephen Glass who had fabricated a number of stories, “was this sense of telling a detective story through journalism, essentially crafting a thriller through a journalistic narrative.”

Mnookin wrote most of Hard News right here at Harvard—in Quincy House. He received a Joan Shorenstein fellowship from the Kennedy School of Government in the spring of 2004, during which time he lived in Quincy E-35 and worked on his manuscript.

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