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Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

nytimes.com

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Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#41

Post by hguant »

dhosek wrote: post #18
darkerside wrote: post #4

I'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!)

>The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)

After the debacle with Lehrer, I'd be amazed if the New Yorker wasn't fact checking everything the print, down to their ad copy.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#42

Post by the_watcher »

> But a factual controversy can also be costly, driving down sales and, in extreme cases, forcing the publisher to recall and destroy finished copies.

Are there examples of this happening? Michael Wolff's book was a bestseller, for example, despite many of the factual disputes coming up prior to its release.

In theory, lack of fact-checking would seriously hurt a traditional media outlet, as it could reduce traffic or subscriptions. For authors, however, it's not exactly the same calculus. Once the book is sold, it's sold (I realize it's a bit more complex than this with advances and returns, my point is that convincing someone to keep paying them monthly isn't a concern). Once they become a best-seller, they'll be able to put "best-seller" in their "About the Author" section. While there's a future credibility argument (which can be partially mitigated by the value of being a "best-selling author"), I'd argue that from a pure "maximize returns from this publication" perspective, there's really only an incentive to fact check things that are so egregious that it could lead to a recall or stop the book from being published in the first place.

This is not a good situation to be in, but the job a publisher is hired to do is to take a manuscript and turn it into something that can be sold in bookstores. I'm not really sure that it should be their role to police this, unless it's published by a media outlet explicitly as journalism.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#43

Post by tyri_kai_psomi »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #39
tyri_kai_psomi wrote: post #15

Add to this Richard Dawkins new book, "Outgrowing God" which is rife with inaccuracies, baseless conjecture about the motivations behind some of the ancients civilizations he talks about (an assyriologist posted a pretty pointed takedown of some of the inaccuracies on twitter https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440 ), and theology so bad you would question whether or not he himself has ever actuall…

Great... so now I can't trust Richard Dawkins OR the people who review his books.

As the twitter thread notes, he seems to have gotten some of his historical information about ancient Mesopotamia from a website called historywiz (https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm), which I suppose is good if you are writing a 8th or 9th grade paper on the topic, but not a book.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#44

Post by cwkoss »

ANPEQ-1 wrote: post #16
hkhanna wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

I've seen some Twitter discussions between journalists about how they consider it important to be "activist journalists" in the modern era.

It seems bias is becoming encouraged, quite disappointing.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#45

Post by cwkoss »

ANPEQ-1 wrote: post #29
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"activist with an agenda" or "defender of truth", you can't be both at the same time, yet many journalists think their role should be both.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#46

Post by pdonis »

hkhanna wrote: post #13
ReptileMan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

But journalists have not been making mistakes "every once in a while". They have been making mistakes constantly. Nor do they "promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out"; they almost never correct them, and often they double down instead. So by your own criteria, journalism no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#47

Post by btrettel »

Even in science there is too little due diligence.

I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a factor of about 4 due to a math error. Out of the hundreds of people to examine this result, I think I'm the only one to notice the error. I spent a fair amount of time checking the literature to make sure I'm not crazy but seems no one noticed the problem.

A result being highly cited is no guarantee that it's correct.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#48

Post by mrguyorama »

btrettel wrote: post #47

Even in science there is too little due diligence. I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a facto…

Is that "off by a factor of 4" result still "useful"? Can you still create products/devices/things/science with that incorrect result? Even epicycles still allowed reduced-accuracy prediction of the movement of heavenly bodies

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#49

Post by btrettel »

mrguyorama wrote: post #48
btrettel wrote: post #47

Even in science there is too little due diligence. I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a facto…

Is that "off by a factor of 4" result still "useful"? Can you still create products/devices/things/science with that incorrect result? Even epicycles still allowed reduced-accuracy prediction of the movement of heavenly bodies

Yes and no.

The result was a factor of 4 too high (edit: 3.3, to be more precise), which is conservative for certain applications. But for those applications I'd argue that you are typically confident that your device is in the atomization regime a priori and don't need to check.

But it's extremely inaccurate for my application, where you don't want your device to be in the atomization regime. In fact, I only started examining this in more detail because my own experiments clearly contradicted the textbooks, review articles, etc. If someone blindly applied this result then they'd potentially make a bad device.

Re: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

#50

Post by jfengel »

NetToolKit wrote: post #23
GrinningFool wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For a long time, there were multiple newspapers in each city. They would love to catch each other in mistakes. If one paper wouldn't publish criticism, the others would.

These weren't just yellow-journalism tabloids, but two or even three genuine competing reporting organizations. They fought to be the first to publish, but couldn't afford to simply publish falsehoods, or fail to admit mistakes.

Not that they were paragons of honor all the time. They're humans. But it did set up a pattern of keeping each other honest, which they maintained to a large degree after they could no longer sustain multiple papers. That has diminished substantially as they're competing against Internet-style "move fast, break things, nobody cares what you wrote yesterday" publishing (and before that, 24 hour TV that wants to present a constant crisis so that you must never turn it off).

So there was less "suppressing public criticism" than you seem to be implying. It happened, to be sure, but it was very different from the current self-swallowing echo chambers you get today -- at least among the major newspapers. Modern journalism, even the comparatively mainstream stuff, has a lot more in common with those yellow journalism tabloids.

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