Jayson Blair - Aftermath

Aftermath

The investigation saw heated debate over affirmative action hiring. Jonathan Landman, Blair's editor, told the Siegal committee he felt being black played a large part in Blair's initial promotion to full-time staffer. "I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion," he said. "I thought then and I think now that it was the wrong decision." On May 14, 2003, while he was still Times executive editor, Howell Raines acknowledged at a massive meeting of Times news staffers, managers, and its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., that Blair had gotten the breaks he had enjoyed because of his race. Five days later, Times African-American op-ed columnist Bob Herbert asserted in his column that race had nothing to do with the Blair case: "Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting."

After resigning from The Times, Blair returned to college and said he planned to go into human resources. The year after he left the Times, he published a memoir, Burning Down My Master's House. Although its initial print run was 250,000 copies, only 1,400 were sold in its first nine days. In 2007 he became a life coach at Ashburn Psychological Services in northern Virginia. In 2010, he began his own consulting and life coaching practice with offices in the Centreville and McLean suburbs of Northern Virginia.