The difference between good and bad ...

Sven J. Bode Publisher of Orlando Style Magazine:: Consistently publishing a class magazine requires a dedicated staff of class people! Although true professionals never knowingly resort to bending truths, embellishing stories or fail to corroborate factual data, even the best will stumble and take an occasional misstep in accurately reporting the facts; such was not the case in the recent August edition of an Orlando publication which ran a story titled “The Natural”, about a local artist named Mark Pulliam, with most of the reported ‘facts’ being nothing more than bad fiction. New York Magazine picked up on this and also reported it in their publication.

We are not attempting to judge the honesty of the magazine or the writer involved but in five years of publishing Orlando Style Magazine, we have never run an article which wasn’t verified as completely as possible. If we couldn’t satisfactorily ‘vet’ a story prior to deadline, despite the level of content interest, we just didn’t put it into print knowing that good journalism, once perfectly ‘tweaked’ will always live to see another day! We would rather wait to publish quality material than to be embarrassed into issuing lengthy retractions.

Hopefully, the astute reader who picked up on the misrepresentation and questioned its honesty will now subscribe to Orlando Style Magazine, if he/she hasn’t already done so! The 180 pages of good journalism are on newsstands Sept. 1st. Read the original text of New York Magazine below.

Again, this is not about our Orlando Style Magazine it is about the other magazine in town. - small difference in names ... big difference in content!

<<Greatest Unknown Yankee Discovered
Mark Pulliam had a story that would put even the most well-rounded athlete to shame: Not only had he played major-league ball for the Yankees, but he’d also been commissioned by George Steinbrenner to paint a portrait of Yankee Stadium to hang in the club’s front office. Paul McCartney was a fan of his work, and Tiger Woods even owned one of his pieces. But this Renaissance man had another talent, too: duping Orlando Magazine into running a profile of him, because it turns out he made the whole story up.

Apparently the magazine didn’t verify anything beyond the fact that Pulliam was a full-time artist, and after his story ran, in an article titled “The Natural,” a reader called their attention to the fact that Pulliam had never played in the majors. (This isn’t terribly hard to verify, by the way.) So the magazine, presumably hard at work on September’s Sidd Finch cover story, did a little bit of belated fact-checking and found he’d never played for the Yankees (or for the University of Florida, as he also claimed). Yankee officials also confirmed to them that his painting of the stadium never hung in the team’s offices, and we’ll go out on a limb and confirm they were laughing pretty hard when they fielded that phone call.

We’re not sure what Pulliam’s endgame was — publicity, we guess, since even after confronted with evidence that his baseball career was fabricated, he insisted that the parts about celebrities owning his work were true. But maybe he was just hoping to land a tryout with the Yankees for real. Considering their alternatives for this weekend, he couldn’t do much worse, could he?

Duped! The Mark Pulliam Story [Orlando Magazine via Sports by Brooks]
By: Joe DeLessio>>

.... read NY Magazine's website, direct link here Greatest Unknown Yankee Discovered