Zach Helfand’s “The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department” (archived) is an excellent read and scratches an itch I’ve had for years (“how does that work, anyhow?”); it begins:
I turned in this piece with seventy-nine errors. Anna, the fact checker who fixed them, has been a member of The New Yorker’s checking department for six years. I enjoy working with Anna, which is good, because being checked by Anna involves maybe a dozen hours on the phone. We talk mainly about facts, and occasionally about foraging for chanterelles, which is her passion. People sometimes ask Anna if she finds many errors. In the eighties, one checker found that an unedited issue of the magazine contained a thousand of them. (This figure itself wouldn’t survive a fact-check, but never mind.) My contribution to the trash heap, in this piece alone, included misspelling several proper nouns (Colombia, alas, is not Columbia), inventing, it seems, a long-ago interaction between a fact checker and the deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and writing about a bird’s kidney when I should have been writing about its liver. I’m sure no errors remain, but I won’t declare it categorically. That kind of thing makes a checker squirm.
I’ve never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: “Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification.” New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word. Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art—full of facts. Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts. Recently, a short story by Clare Sestanovich made a passing reference to yellow bird poop. The checker consulted ornithological sources. Would a bird poop yellow? Maybe, if it had a liver problem.
Fiction is full of facts—sometimes too many. Dates are facts, clothes are facts, actions are facts. Quotes are facts, and they contain them; facts can be nesting, like a Russian doll. A decade ago, Calvin Tomkins wrote about an artist who said he was getting married on June 21st, the summer solstice. The checker, David Kortava, called the artist, congratulated him, and alerted him that the solstice would be on the twentieth that year. The artist moved the wedding date.
Actually, however, he turned in the piece with at least eighty errors. Here’s a letter I sent to the magazine (since I’m sure they won’t print it, I might as well share it myself):
As a copyeditor (ret’d), I tend to notice errors, and of course I’ve been aware of the increasing flood in recent years, even in such formerly impeccable publications as, yes, the New Yorker. When I saw the blatant typo “connecwts” on p. 17 of the Sept. 1 & 8 centenary issue, I groaned and told my wife Harold Ross was spinning in his grave, but I did not bestir myself to write and complain. Now, however, I have reached p. 26 and seen Brendan Gill quoted as follows: “The impression conveyed by these words was, and was intended to be, that a sorely tired man of superior skills was consenting to improve the work of someone who was at best lazy and at worst an imbecile.” I knew at once something was wrong, and when I checked Here at the New Yorker I found that, sure enough, Gill had written “sorely tried.” And this in an article on fact checking — the system’s fallen down! Perhaps your checkers need more breaks or more coffee; you surely do not have the ambition of becoming the American Grauniad. (Note to editor: do not correct the spelling; if necessary, have a fact checker explain the reference.)
I sent that off in the heat of the moment; had I read further, I would have gotten to this passage:
Some people greet a New Yorker correction as they would an eclipse. In 1994, several errors appeared in a Talk of the Town piece. The magazine issued a correction, which several publications reported as if it were a seminal event. Hendrik Hertzberg went to the library to investigate. “This was not the first correction in the magazine’s history, it was roughly the three hundredth,” he reported. He added, “Every great journalistic enterprise occasionally makes errors.” I can confirm. Since that first correction, I let through some more. I will not name the figure, to avoid startling Anna.
People like finding errors in the magazine, probably because the magazine is so smug about its fact checking. Checking does contain an element of theatre—a performance of over-the-top diligence that burnishes a myth but doesn’t always correlate with accuracy. Checking isn’t a marketing ploy, exactly, but it is good marketing. […]
The other thing you get a lot is “William Shawn would be turning over in his grave.” As a literal fact, this is uncheckable, though the implication that the magazine reached peak truth under Shawn, its second editor, transcends credulence. Shawn was a perfectionist, but, given the choice between prose and accuracy, he didn’t always side with accuracy. The writer Ben Yagoda dug up the checking proofs of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and found that, beside a section that narrated the actions of a person who was alone and immediately thereafter murdered, Shawn scribbled, “How know?” Yagoda explained, “There was in fact no way to know, but the passage stayed.”
At least I name-checked Ross rather than Shawn; still, it’s embarrassing to be so predictable. (N.b.: Both my “the system’s fallen down!” and Helfand’s “transcends credulence” are quotes from the excitable and oddly-Englished Ross.)