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Disgraced reporter tells how drugs fueled his writing

Trouble just seems to follow Jayson Blair around. The disgraced New York Times reporter, sacked for making up stories last year, is at the center of a new scandal as his tell-all memoir is about to hit bookshops.

Advance copies of the book have been leaked to newspapers, including The New York Times itself, prompting the publishers to warn of a campaign to rubbish the tome before it comes out.

In seeking to explain away the worst scandal ever to hit the US' most venerable broadsheet, Blair describes a "cut-throat culture that leaves no rivals standing" and admits he had a huge drug problem. Blair even admits drugs, especially cocaine, helped him to write. "Some of my best stories were inspired by drug-fueled writing," Blair writes.

Blair was exposed as a fraud last year after complaints from staff and readers that some of his stories appeared to be copied from other newspapers. A huge internal investigation uncovered serial fraud. Blair made up stories and sources, invented interview subjects and often wrote stories claiming to be from far-flung parts of the US when he had not left his Brooklyn flat.

In Burning Down My Master's House, Blair gives a no-holds-barred account of his rise and fall. The 27-year-old faked his first story after Sept. 11, 2001, when he embellished an interview with a victim called Andrew Rosstein. "I improvised by creating a last name for him," Blair wrote. "I had lifted quotes from other papers before, but never made something up. I do not know where it came from or how I got the name or what I was feeling at the moment -- other than a desperate desire to get into the newspaper."

Blair makes no secret about where that led. "I lied and I lied, and then I lied some more. I lied about where I had been, I lied about where I had found information, I lied about how I wrote the story," he writes.
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