New Yorker magazine returned the National Magazine Award that it won for an article on Japan’s “rental household” industry, the first prize in 55 years of history in the magazine industry’s highest honor.
The 2019 award in news reporting went to the New York writer and team Elif Batuman for the April 2018 article, which described two people who said they were customers of a Tokyo-based service called Family Romance. One said he was a lonely widower who hired actresses through the company to play the role of wife and daughter, and the other said she was a single mother who rented a replacement father for her daughter.
In a note from the editor of December 2020 added to the online version of the article, the New Yorker said that both alleged customers were in fact married. The woman appears to be married to the owner of Family Romance, the note said. The findings about the three people, which followed an internal New Yorker investigation, “largely undermine the credibility of what they told us,” the note said.
The American Society of Magazine Editors, which sponsors the National Magazine Awards in association with Columbia University’s journalism school, said in a statement that the New Yorker decided to return the award. The society said Batuman sources deceived her and said it “praises the New Yorker for its investigation of history”.
Sid Holt, executive director of Society magazine, initially told the Washington Post that he did not think that problems with the article would lead to reconsideration of the award.