Jayson Blair

Jayson Blair is a journalist who understands truthiness.

He was considered a rising star at the New York Times because he was able to write compelling and interesting stories about any assignment from his editors.

Unfortunately, editors at NYT do not like the stories in their paper to be "compelling" or "interesting." Readers might mistake the Gray Lady for the New York Post of the Daily News if that happened too often.

The editors of the Times are so scared of truthiness that they actually fired Blair when they found out that he was writing from his gut -- where all good writing should originate.

Blair wasn't a factonista. Unlike like most of the "reporters" at the Times, Blair wasn't a tool of the airline industry who needed to hop on a plane to "research" and "interview." He became a star reporter at NYT by writing what he felt was true if it would make a good story.

Blair didn't need to hop onto a plane and wander around in the muck to "investigate" a story. His gut told him all he needed to know after a quick search of the Lexis/Nexis database for good text-bites and quotations.

But when his bosses found out how truthy Blair was, they fired both him and the editor who hired him. It became a big boo-hoo "crisis" at the paper.