I'm intrigued by the claim of "dropped footnotes" (and its passive construction). How exactly were these footnotes dropped? There seems to be an implied blame of the word processing software and I find that rather dubious.
Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#22I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question wh…
>This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era. It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channel…
> Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers.
It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era. It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channel…
> Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
> which would then publish them
Only if the newspapers themselves allowed it. Newspapers could suppress public criticism that came their way through this channel if they so chose.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness. This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors. If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go. Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evide…
As a former NYTimes employee, I can assure you that 99% of the work is not done in good faith. It's all activism now, top to bottom. There's a few good eggs granted, but the newspaper has an agenda and uses their pseudo-objectivity/newspaper of record as cover and concealment.
Newspapers have always had an agenda. Op-eds particularly have always been a cesspool of political nonsense.
The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters.
Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#25I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question wh…
Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)
Fact checking sounds great in theory but maybe in practice maybe it is an exercise in confirmation bias.
For example, in a case cited by the article an author did employ at least one fact checker[0] who was an ostensible expert and who describes a reasonable effort but who still got it wrong (maybe).
In another example, the article alludes to "mistakes" which was actually plagiarism.[1]
If the question really is a matter of trusting books or not, then maybe a reasonable heuristic is to identify the agenda of the author and weight more heavily the writings of authors with divergent priors, similar to Slate Star Codex' idea of adversarial collaboration.[2] An example is Kahneman and Klein's Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree.[3]
0. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay...
1. https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202
2. https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#26It is always entertaining when the 'newspaper of record' shames other publications for their mistakes and failings.
They are working hard to lose the newspaper of record status. They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and blamed it on editorial process. Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told others she had no recollec…
At least Buzzfeed never tried to convince the American public that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and therefor should be invaded and occupied. NY Times is already below Buzzfeed.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era. It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channel…
> Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
That's a good point I didn't even think of, however it may have been subject to censorship and editing by the newspaper staff and would have limited reach for most newspapers, not a global audience.
Also I don't think I ever wrote a response to any newspaper in pre internet times, that's a lot of work just to be heard.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#28I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question wh…
With the 24 hour news cycle, I've started regarding large popular news-o-tainment companies in the same vein. CNN/FOX are just as bad as assuming some egg on twitter is reporting unaltered truths.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former NYTimes employee, I can assure you that 99% of the work is not done in good faith. It's all activism now, top to bottom. There's a few good eggs granted, but the newspaper has an agenda and uses their pseudo-objectivity/newspaper of record as cover and concealment.
Newspapers have always had an agenda. Op-eds particularly have always been a cesspool of political nonsense. The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters. Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.
"Newspapers have always had an agenda"
I'm fine with this, so long as they don't insist on their objectivity. Otherwise everything they say must be filtered through an undefined lens that readers either a) don't have time for and are thus victimized by the 'untruth' or b) believe and desire the confirmation bias and are thus victimized by misinformation.
Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
#30I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question wh…
Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)
Do "fact checks" include oversights and misleading premises? Would a fact check have caught the bias in a recent NYT article, for instance?