Did NY Mag Rush Their James Frey Feature Online Only After Learning Of WSJ Scoop?

Readers of both NYMag.com and the Wall Street Journal‘s website may have noticed that in the wee small hours of the morning, both publications posted similar but competing articles about author James Frey and Full Fathom Five, the book-packaging company he launched to churn out young adult fiction. As it turns out, New York’s version was rushed online only after the magazine learned that the WSJ was about to scoop them on a story they’d had in the works for weeks.

The articles’ tones vary drastically. The WSJ‘s Katherine Rosman and Lauren A. E. Schuker offer a measured view of Frey’s operation, noting how little Frey pays the young writers he employs (“they get $250 upon signing and another $250 upon completion of a book”) as well as how successful its first major product, a story called I Am Number Four that’s being adapted into a movie by Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg, has been. New York Magazine‘s Suzanne Mozes, by contrast, is unabashedly negative in her (much-longer) piece. She accuses Frey of rampant exploitation and implies that the bestselling author is an insufferable, amoral egomaniac (“he’s in it to ‘change the game’ and ‘move the paradigm’; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world,” she writes).

As it turns out, Mozes has a personal ax to grind against Frey. In her article, she recalls how she was once in talks to write a book for Full Fathom Five. She implies that Frey ultimately declined to work with her because she requested a more equitable contract: “Twenty-eight minutes after I sent an e-mail requesting amendments to the contract, I received an e-mail from Frey rescinding his offer to collaborate. ‘We loved the idea that we eventually arrived at together,’ he wrote. ‘At this time, though, we don’t think this going to work out.’”

Rosman and Schuker, by contrast, have no connection to Frey outside of their article. They do, however, make reference to Mozes’s story in a paragraph describing the disputes authors have had with Full Fathom Five:

Full Fathom Five is already wrapped in real-life drama. One writer hired attorneys to represent him when dealings with Mr. Frey grew contentious (the dispute was settled late last month). Mr. Frey says that a disgruntled writer is working on a magazine story about him. The writer declined comment. “I go to work and try to do cool things. I can’t control what people write about me,” says Mr. Frey.

And there’s more to the story than that. A source familiar with both Frey stories tells us that New York Magazine wasn’t planning to run Mozes’s piece early this morning. The article, supposedly, wasn’t ready yet; the magazine’s editors thought they would have all day to prepare it, since the WSJ‘s story wasn’t supposed to go online until this evening.

The source tells Mediaite that when NY Mag discovered the WSJ‘s story’s true publication date, they scrambled to get Mozes’s piece ready. They called a Frey rep to do some last-minute fact checking, supposedly discovering in the process that eight of the 12 facts they had left to verify were incorrect. The Frey rep they contacted was reportedly so exasperated with New York that he told the mag, “Well, the Wall Street Journal piece is now up, so why don’t you fact check against that?”

Mozes also writes this in her Frey take-down: “Fathom Five has shrouded itself in a degree of secrecy unusual in the publishing world, and Frey declined to participate in this story.” Our source, however, says that Frey did give New York two quotes for Mozes’s story—both of which were rejected. They were:

“For an accurate piece about me and my business, please see The Wall Street Journal.”

-and-

“8 of the 12 ‘facts’ New York Magazine checked with us are wrong, so judge this article accordingly.”

Our take? Frey comes off as kind of a jerk in both articles, though Mozes is clearly biased in her piece—maybe that’s why so many of her facts were supposedly incorrect. Regardless, each story is a great read in its own right. Check them out at WSJ.com and NYMag.com.

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