

How copy editing is done at the New Yorker - yarapavan
http://www.redroom.com/blog/andyross/copy-editing-the-new-yorker-magazine-an-interview-with-mary-norris

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jwecker
9 years ago there was a small writeup about me in the New Yorker-
[http://www.petermaass.com/articles/the_supercool_top-
secret_...](http://www.petermaass.com/articles/the_supercool_top-secret_dvd-
decoder_song/) \- 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 (:

~~~
rg
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."

