"This New Republic Story? It's a F*cking Sieve."

Adam Penenberg Joins Us on Episode 2 of "Are You Mad at Me?," a Shattered Glass Podcast

By Erica C. Barnett

As PubliCola readers may know, I've been doing a side project: For a year, my great friend and longtime colleague Josh Feit and I will be recording a monthly podcast, called "Are You Mad At Me?," about one of our favorite movies of all time, Shattered Glass.

The movie, which came out in 2003 and covers events from the late 1990s, is nominally about one of the most audacious journalism frauds of all time, but it plays like a compact, rewarding thriller: Every scene propels you to the next, as the dominoes fall and Stephen Glass, the antihero of the movie, gets his comeuppance thanks to the work of dogged journalists at a digital startup that had something to prove.

Our special guest for the second episode is one of the movie's heroes, Adam Penenberg. Penenberg, portrayed by Steve Zahn in Shattered Glass, was working for an early online outlet called Forbes Digital Tool when his editor, Kambiz Foroohar, demanded to know why Glass had scooped him on a story about teenage hackers.

That story, "Hack Heaven," focused on a kid named Ian Restil who had hacked into a "big-time software firm" called Jukt Micronics; instead of prosecuting him, the company hired him to provide digital security. It was part of a nationwide trend in which hackers, often represented by professional agents, were holding companies hostage and extracting huge payments in exchange for protecting them from other hackers.

Of course, the story was completely fabricated—and Penenberg was the one who unraveled the fraud. In our interview, Penenberg tells us what it was like to uncover the story and reflects on what it was like to be a reporter for a digital startup going up against a venerable institution like The New Republic. He also offers his thoughts on why Glass decided to fabricate stories instead of just reporting them, and tells us what it was like talking to Steve Zahn as he was developing his character for the movie. Today, Penenberg is the director of the American Journalism Online Master's program at NYU.

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