The Age fires freelancer who faked viral ‘Melbourne man’ hipster profile
Fairfax newspaper The Age will no longer use the services of freelancer Tara Kenny after it was revealed she had faked two fashion vox pops for the paper’s Street Seen section with her friends.
The paper ran a ‘Street Seen’ fashion profile penned by Melbourne University student Kenny on ‘Samuel Davide Hains’, showcasing the hipster’s interesting dress sense including back to front overalls, a pink beret and sporting a tote bag.
However the piece attracted a lot of attention on social media and spread globally, with news outlets including News.com.au, ABC News, the UK Independent, Daily Mail, FoxFM and Metro in the UK dubbing him the “world’s biggest hipster”, and ‘Melbourne man’.
In the interview, which is supposed to see a reporter stop someone with interesting dress sense in the street for a quick vox pop, Hains highlighted the virtues of K Mart fashion, Trotsky in leather, and “bucolic jazz socialism”.
However Hains has since admitted the whole thing was a hoax in an interview Vice, saying he was a friend of Kenny and the pair had cooked up the comedic “persona” for the column, adding her previous effort for the column was also fabricated with a friend.
“My friend Tara (Kenny) runs the ‘Street Seen’ column [in The Age] and asked me if I wanted to do it. The decision to do it in character was impulsive. I think the impulse to do it in character initially came from wanting to avoid the embarrassment of doing the column sincerely,” Hains told Vice.
“Street Seen seemed like a great platform for performance, given the fact that the subject is represented as their authentic self, caught on the street. I felt I could experiment with the reader’s willingness to engage with me as an ‘unstaged,’ ‘natural’ character.
“I LOVE jazz and I am a web developer. Davide is not a person, but he is a persona — there are elements of my authentic self in Davide. Once we had the outfit together, Tara asked me the questions, and I just said the first thing that came into my head. I was just trying to be funny.”
He explained how he had borrowed the pink beret from Kenny, adding: “I put the overalls on backwards by mistake, we thought it was funny so we just rolled with it. Tara suggested I needed a bag and grabbed the tote.”
In a statement for Mumbrella Kenny apologised for her actions saying she never intended to “troll” Fairfax editors, adding: “I understand that there are journalistic principles of integrity that need to be adhered to, but personally see a rather significant distinction between making up content for hard news stories and exaggerating a character for a street fashion column.” See her full statement at the end of this article.
Hains went public after a number of media outlets, including The Age, did follow ups stories on how the vox pop had gone viral and noting that people were raising questions about its legitimacy.
“Hipster or hero? Fashion icon or phoney?,” wrote Age journalists Melissa Singer and Beau Donelly in a front page story earlier this week in The Age. “These are the questions being asked about 24-year-old Melbourne web developer Samuel Davide Hains, whose back-to-front vintage overalls and esoteric musings on Trotsky and being a “mystery blogger and jazz kitten” have catapulted him from street style subject to global phenomenon.”
Vice also reported that Kenny had run other fake fashion pops include one of their friend Maillie, which was published under the name of Molly Eliza Halloran, whose picture appears to have been taken in front of the same wall as Hains’.
Hains also told Vice how easy it was to fool the media, taking aim at Age rival News.com.au. He told how Maillie Halloran had been interviewed after he failed to answer their questions.
“It’s hilarious, she’s amazing. News.com.au kept asking me for an interview, but I was at work and I saw the article was published on news.com.au anyway. Maillie was interviewed instead, and was able to completely fabricate a story about my childhood with no consent and feed it to the media.”
Among the quotes from Halloran News.com.au ran were: ““No kidding, he once wore a torn garbage bag as a rain poncho. The only reason he got away with it was because he was the school’s star English and politics student.
“I think they thought they had the next Allen Ginsberg or Andy Warhol on their hands so they let it all go by.”
It is understood that the publisher has told staff it will not be using Kenny’s services again after she was questioned about Hains authenticity and told the newspaper he was legitimate.
In a statement posted on The Age website this afternoon Age editor Alex Lavelle said:”We always suspected some of the comments were tongue in cheek – after all, who wears dungarees backwards and pairs their K-Mart purchases with a Chanel cape? Street Seen has always involved a lighter look at Melbourne fashion,”
“What is not acceptable, however, is that the journalist concocted the plan with her friend and then lied to one of our reporters about her relationship with Mr Hains. Fairfax Media expects all journalists to report truthfully and fairly on all subjects in all sections.
“Ms Kenny will not be doing any work for Fairfax Media in the future and this week’s Street Seen in M Magazine has been scrapped.”
Back in March, Fairfax cut more than 120 editorial staff saying it would rely more on freelancers for copy.
In the wake of the revelation that the story was a hoax a number of social media users have criticised the Fairfax newspaper for not spotting the fake.
Vice caught up with “the most Melbourne man ever” and… it seems it was all a set-up joke https://t.co/10q4jL6yGO pic.twitter.com/eSCTz3yYN9
— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) July 7, 2016
Relieved Melbourne man was a joke, but this is fraud is an indictment of paper & the people who thought he was cool https://t.co/rnaVqa0XWF
— Peter Lalor (@plalor) July 8, 2016
Fake hipster is also selling out his @theage friend for deliberately making stuff up and printing it as fact https://t.co/tz4eT0c4aX
— Kyle Pollard (@KylePollard) July 8, 2016
Tara Kenny’s statement to Mumbrella in full:
I never intended to deceive or “troll” my editors at Fairfax, the wider media or the general public with the Samuel Davide Hains column. I approached Sam because he wears good outfits and is hilarious – the one thing that has become abundantly clear from all this “viral” madness – and I wanted to share that. He agreed on the condition that he would appear as an exaggerated caricature.
While the column is meant to feature real people spotted organically on the street, it is an inherently playful read that is meant to be entertaining, hence I felt comfortable exercising a level of artistic licence. I understand that there are journalistic principles of integrity that need to be adhered to, but personally see a rather significant distinction between making up content for hard news stories and exaggerating a character for a street fashion column.
I was under the impression that my follow up conversation with The Age reported Melissa Singer was a tongue in cheek exchange, but am truly sorry if my actions have had negative repercussions for her. I also want to mention that I have only been writing this column for two weeks, while the regular writer is away.
I do not wish to implicate her in this! I think it’s a really cute column and only ever wanted to give people a bit of comic relief in this crazy, messed up world. I hope this doesn’t ruin my career, but if it does at least it’s still the funniest and weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. If any other media outlet wants me to write a comedic street fashion column or tell all memoir I am available 😉 While Fairfax has advised that they no longer require my services, I am a freelance writer and the very proud online editor for a magazine called Ladies of Leisure (ladiesofleisurezine.com)! My instagram handle is @tk_2k16_
Fairfax fires the writer that gave them what will probably be their most talked about exclusive story of the year, that was all in the name of a bit of fun.
These rapscallions made my day when the “story” first came out, and they’ve made it all over again now that they’ve proved my instincts right and revealed that it was a joke.
Kenny is right: a fashion-on-the-streets vox pop column isn’t news, and certainly isn’t something worth getting your knickers in a knot over. If anything, the fact that this got through to the keeper could indicate that Fairfax is putting their fact-checking priorities in the right place – where the actual news is.
I would love to close with a comment saying that I’ve bookmarked her site, but it’s so terribly designed that I won’t be going back anytime soon. Bit of a shame, really. I was looking forward to some more shameless silliness.
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This whole thing was stupid and even funny, but at the end of the day, a major newspaper got duped by one of its own freelancers and published several false stories. The editors should apologise — that is what media outlets do when their writers are caught lying. Instead, they published an unbylined article http://www.theage.com.au/victo.....q1mnw.html that ledes with a defence from a blogger at a fashion magazine, before pinning all the blame on the freelancer they didn’t bother to factcheck (even though they admit it didn’t pass the smell test). Weak.
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Tara and Samuel are Australia’s Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston.
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Haha!! Don’t see what the problem is.
Most ‘journalists ‘ sorry I mean Social commentars just make crap up anyway.
They all belong in the sewers
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Its not the point. there is no authority for her to have an ‘artistic licence’ on faking bios and outright deceiving readers. Starts with this, then what else?
The fact that this so called reporter has then had the audacity to justify, excuse, and meekly acknowledge outright manipulation is systemic in todays under 30s never ever owning their mistakes, taking accountability and moving on. Instead, there’s the concern only on not wanting it to damage their career.
Furthermore, this woman was holding a position for a colleague of only two weeks, and she cheapened the article overnight. Goodbye to your career and good riddance.
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Fairfax judge their journos on how many clicks they get yet dismiss a freelance journo that delivered highly on that metric with (obviously) fake bullshit.
They get exactly what they deserve. You sack serious, experienced reporters because quality journalism costs more than peanuts and doesn’t generate the clicks that fake hipster would.
Now your reputation is muddied not because a clickbait merchant conned your editor to run this on the front page, which is hugely embarrassing, but because that is the newsroom culture that you have sewed.
You pay for what you get. You may con clueless advertisers (and editors) with your clickbait nonsense but you won’t con readers.
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I’m not surprised that the story was a fake. I’ m so disappointed that The Age would give so much space to such trivia. I ‘m a rusted on Age reader & have defended it’s quality to several people, but that story was embarrassingly bad,
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Ridiculous, but also typical of these times that she was sacked.
That was the funniest thing I had read all year. Creative and intelligent!
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Good for you Tara. Here’s hoping you get loads of work as a result of this, from publications with a better sense of humour, and a better appreciation of the value of social media and viral stories. And maybe a better rate of pay for freelancers too…
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Look, if you want to interview interesting people in Melbourne there are plenty from whom to choose but The Age is not about interesting people, nor is it evidently about fact checking. How many of their articles are made up? The Herald-Sun has a letters page that has for years published opinions sharing not just opinions but incredibly similar sentence structure. Who is going to fact check the Fourth Estate when the role of public fact checking has been assigned to the very people needing same. It is only by the intense scrutiny of others that this sad truth has come to light: Tara and her friends are privileged brats from Melbourne/Monash universities, and their dress-up games mock the honestly interesting people The Age would never deem worthy enough of their attention.
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The Age was right to let her go. Funny or not, great coverage, viral sensation etc etc or not. Reporters are there to report. Not make up fiction. If she wants to be a comedy writer she should focus on that and let someone else have a go at this style of writing. It’s a dumb fashion column sure, but she clearly wasn’t taking her job seriously when she should have been, which means she’s either lazy and couldn’t be bothered doing it properly or thought it would be great to con her editors, colleagues and public for the amusement of her friends. Her ‘apology’ is far from it and just another form of self-promotion.
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They fired her because she lied when questioned about the authenticity. Fair cop, I reckon!
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Who is sillier? The freelancer trying to justify fabrication or The Age for putting its paper at risk. All the typos and lack of sub-editing, misleading headlines and garbage click bait are probably doing more to undermine the integrity of the Age than this stunt, but holy crap, this is dumb and dumber territory.
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How outraged people are when they make fun of someone, only to find out the joke’s on them!
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Ethics! After years and years of cringe worthy, pseudladen commentary of the most pompous kind, The Age gets antsy over a pair of dungarees!
If and when they ever revert to asking reasonable questions and reporting clearly the balanced view I shall resume contact. Until then I’d rather watch apples grow.
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It’s not the point – she lied to a reporter when interviewed after the fact. That would have been the perfect chance to reveal the plot – she never planned on revealing the truth, but her “friend” decided to spill all to Vice and sold her out. Moreover, she was just filling in for a colleague who was on leave and apparently entrusted her to look after it – how nasty and thoughtless can you get?
The stupid thing is, some clickbaity publication is probably going to offer her a job after this. Employing a liar who shows no regard for her colleagues – great idea.
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What is all the fuss about?
I think it is hilarious.
Perhaps Tara should have published this interview on April Fool’s day. Then perhaps the righteous police may have been less offended.
What happened to a sense of humour?
Age! Reinstate Tara!
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this is hilarious. I want to hire this woman!
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Hilarious. Enriches the newspaper. A rare Camellia on the moss moment. The concept of the street fashion if it is taken seriously by readers is a nonsense that is only improved with creative nonsense writing. Congrats Kenny.
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It’s Putin’s fault.
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I wish that uncritically repeating the justification for the Iraq war or giving a platform to extremists like Bolt and Hanson were as scandalous as a student faking a piece for a fluffy sidebar than no-one cares about.
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What a joke! The Hipsters of Melbourne was covered several years ago by authentic persons and credible journalists. She has ripped the story and content from another journalist and make it sensational now by saying it was a joke….here we go the problem here is she lied in the face of confrontation. She has destroyed her integrity and for social media seriously it shows us how shallow the world has become for 5 minutes of fame. Good luck darling. The Age did the right thing!!
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Please somebody hire these folk as script writers. The Aussie film industry needs your penmanship desperately.
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i strogley belive that he was makeing a mokery of what they were doing in the paper only because he seemed to thinke that it was going to be something but i soon realised that that it was not funny at all especally when he flameinwell looked pathetic and he dose deserve to get what is getting to him in alot of ways he dose
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Caroline could totally get a job as an Age sub.
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This was so obviously and immediately fake. Maybe the whole chain of command should be given the arse seeing as their checks and balances (if any) couldn’t sniff out this stinker.
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Ay yay yay … the desecration of the vox pop journalism ‘art’ form. The hunt, the prowl, the approach, the building trust … just enough to eke out decent quotes and get permission to take a photo – this is the FUN of vox pop pursuits.
As a former Sunday Age staffer (way way way back in its formative years), I did the vox pop for some years each week. Sure, cold calling folks in Bourke Street Mall for their views about the ridiculous home loan interest rates at that time (around the 18% mark) was the toughest. I approached almost 60 people with my spiel before I could get half a dozen people to say ‘yes, I’m fine with that’.
It was worth it.
Though, sometimes getting the singular celebrity vox pop was more tricky. Pre-internet days, it was only through ringing Actors’ Equity agents that I could figure our who was representing who and “track ’em down” for a quote. Pester power sometimes worked – I remember both Dermot Brereton and Kate Cerebrano saying “you? You’re calling me again? What do I have to do to stop you ringing me about vox pops?”
“Talk to me, please,” I replied.
Perseverance. It’s at the core of journalism.
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5 minutes of my life I will never get back *sigh*
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Never celebrate lazy journalism. It’s a slippery slope. Doesn’t matter what you report. If this girl couldn’t find an interesting subject out in the Melbourne streets, she’s not cut out for the job.
Also don’t get those people complaining about fairfax letting her go, and at the same time saying something around the lines of “you never believe what you read in the papers,” what sort of logic does that hit? What do you expect? They had no choice. Doesn’t matter what beat she was covering. How much angrier would you be if they kept her? Seems that you’ll be angry no matter what they did. But that’s internet logic, huh.
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Starts with this, then what else?
Editor of The Sun perhaps. I wonder if she can hack phones too?
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I hear that the Betoota Advocate might be advertising
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Sounds like she would make a great politician.
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Let me get this straight: she was freelancing for a freelancer for a paper that is increasingly becoming infotainment? Kudos to her.
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Clearly Tara is seriously talented. She should be hired to work on Mad as Hell.
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