Like another 200 people on the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s staff, former Young & Hungry writer and current Times-Picayune food critic Brett Anderson was fired today. But Anderson tells the Post‘s Erik Wemple (also a City Paper alum) that he was told he was being let go for an unusual reason: his recently-awarded Nieman Fellowship to study for a year at Harvard.

A Nieman spokeswoman tells Wemple that they don’t know of any other case of someone being fired for receiving the fellowship. Making the story stranger, weeks ago the paper announced that its post-layoff plans included expanding food coverage.