How copy editing is done at the New Yorker | Hacker News Reader

How copy editing is done at the New Yorker

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43 pointsyarapavan3 comments

9 years ago there was a small writeup about me in the New Yorker- http://www.petermaass.com/articles/the_supercool_top-secret_... - small as in it was in the "talk of the town" section, which tends to cover trivial things in a column or so.

That one write-up of the incident changed my perception of the media profoundly. I had been interviewed probably a dozen times before the interview with Peter Maass, and had even appeared on TV (some Canadian show I don't remember)- and had been mentioned in 60-minutes.

Most of the interviews were probably 5-10 minutes long and resulted in multi-page articles. The interview with Peter took over two hours and resulted in the 7 paragraphs that you can't even find leafing through the issue because it's so small (not a complaint, btw- I was just super pleased to be in the New Yorker at all).

More importantly, though, in addition to the two hour interview, I received a call from a no-nonsense "fact-checker" the day after. She had a pre-compiled list of every (_every_) fact Peter was going to mention in his article. It went something like this:

"You say you had [x] downloads of the song in [x] days. Do you have logs that can prove this to some degree?"

"You say you are enrolled at the University of Utah but they cannot get us proof before we go to print- do you have proof?" (I didn't, it was nixed).

"You say you were ranked #1 in folk-songs at mp3.com- they have chosen not to comment and say they have no idea. Do you have proof?" (thankfully I had taken a screenshot that mp3.com verified as accurate).

This went on for _3 hours_ and several emails and physical mailings.

Of all the other blogs, tv shows, magazines, newspapers, etc. that talked to me- (btw, I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really heard of blogs until then)- guess how many did _any_ sort of fact checking? None.

The thought occurred to me then that if they went through that much trouble for something more or less in the gossip section, I could probably trust their more meaty articles. More importantly it showed me that there are definitely worlds of difference between how media vets what they report.

Edit: Now I just read the magazine for the cartoons though because of pressures on my time (:

I don't care for most of their editorials, and generally don't read the fiction either, but the expository writing in The New Yorker is often superb and quite intellectually stimulating. This peek into the behind-the-scenes processes there goes a long way towards explaining why.

More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed, and (as for jwecker) focused on hard-to-verify matters. I asked the fact-checker about the process, and she said that the job had gotten much easier, since they could now check most facts using the web.

Think of how difficult the New Yorker's fact checking was before the web! The process of fact-checking goes back to the early days of the New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. James Thurber wrote (in "The Years With Ross") of "Ross's later intense dedication to precision. He studied the New York Telephone Company's system of verifying names and numbers in its directories ... He found out about the Saturday Evening Post's checking department, which he said consisted of seven women who checked in turn every fact, name, and date. ... His checking department became famous, in the trade, for a precision that sometimes leaned over backward. ... Ross's checkers once informed Mencken that he couldn't have eaten dinner at a certain European restaurant he had mentioned in one of his New Yorker articles, because there wasn't any restaurant at the address he had given. Mencken brought home a menu with him to prove that he was right, but he was pleased rather than annoyed. 'Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,' he said."

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