New Yorker magazine has returned a National Magazine Award it won for an article on the Japanese “rental family” industry, the first return of an award in its 55-year history of the magazine industry’s highest honor.
The 2019 feature film writing award went to New Yorker and staff writer Elif Batuman for the April 2018 article, which featured 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 roles of wife and daughter, and the other said she was a single mother hiring a replacement father for her daughter.
In a December 2020 editor’s note added to the online version of the article, the New Yorker said that both alleged clients were in fact married. The woman appears to be married to the owner of Family Romance, the note said. The findings on the three people, which followed an internal investigation by the New Yorker, “broadly undermine the credibility of what they told us,” the note said.
The American Society of Magazine Editors, which sponsors the National Magazine Awards in conjunction with Columbia University’s journalism school, said in a statement that the New Yorker has decided to return the award. The society said Ms. Batuman’s sources deceived her, saying it “commends the New Yorker for researching the story.”
Sid Holt, executive director of the magazine society, initially told the Washington Post he didn’t think the issues with the article would lead to reconsideration of the prize.