In the annals of crimes against journalism, Sylvester's single composite bar scene in a recent Voice cover story about picking up women is neither culturally significant nor journalistically shocking. Appearing in the alternative newsweekly that essentially invented New Journalism over 50 years ago, slamming several scenes into a single composite is hardly groundbreaking.

Even mainstream dailies are now infusing nonfiction writing with story techniques borrowed from novels. Stories are told in scenes, instead of through a strict chronology. Stark quotes are fleshed out with extended dialog. (When I edited the City Paper a decade ago, our writers got very little latitude from the literal truth. No piped quotes, No piped scenes.) Journalists even compose internal monologues to represent a subject's thoughts. In the right context, none of these techniques violates the pact between writer and reader. And I don't remember Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe warning readers that, no, they really can't hear the voices inside someone else's head.

Still, in Sylvester's case, a warning may have been warranted: a single line telling readers that one scene was drawn from several situations. With that, Sylvester's beleaguered scene could easily have been legitimized. Such an admission is hardly unusual, and had the Voice done so at the outset, Sylvester's scene wouldn't have yielded so much as a yawn.

It's an editor's duty to protect the trust between writer and reader. Which makes me wonder what Voice editor Doug Simmons knew, and when he knew it. One could draw some serious inferences from the fact that Sylvester was suspended temporarily, while Simmons was dismissed. Makes you wonder: Has Simmons been turning a blind eye to juicing stories for a while? And will the new owners of the Voice be exhuming old stories—like the New York Times did to Jayson Blair—to see if there's a pattern of peccadillos, or worse?

Hard to tell. The newspaper's new publishers did yank Sylvester's story, "Do You Wanna Kiss Me?" from their Web site, and apparently even scrubbed the Google cache. Fortunately, it remains available on a blog (www.gawker.com/news/nicksylvester/) and the story is worth a second look. It's more than a tale about the popular book The Game, a bible of bullshit that men feed women to get sex. Sylvester seems also to be writing about con-men, and the art of telling tales—whether as a pickup artist, or even as a journalist.

Intended or not, Sylvester's piece offers a curious parallel to the stories with which journalists seduce their readers. In fact, the disgraced scene itself details the exploits of three writers—four, including Sylvester—trying out their lines on would-be bed mates. It's all about pensmen in service to their penises. The three have just swooped in from the left coast, where women are wising up. The verbal gambits from The Game are being parried by savvy women who know the score.

These three writers—Harvard grads like Sylvester—are his peers. Now, if Sylvester had thought that his one amalgamated scene violated journalistic ethics, why would he leave himself so utterly open to detection? From Sylvester's perspective this may have been The Journalism Game as it is properly played—not a lie, but an accepted convention. Yet in a lovely piece of irony, writer Steve Lookner—"Steve Lucien" in the story—dropped the dime on Sylvester.

Sylvester's game is gone. And somehow I doubt that other such games will be uncovered at the Voice. Nonetheless, what the new owners did to Sylvester and his editor is surely a shot across the bow of the mother ship of New Journalism.

That's good, if writers rely more on honest craft than dishonest jiggering. But alt weeklies have always served as workshops to forge new forms of trust between writer and reader, and I'd hate to see a retreat. Because in these repressive times, we all need every means to tell the truth that we can invent.