Ever wondered how the fact-checking process works? Well wonder no longer. The Columbia Journalism Review posted an excerpt from their recently published Art of Making Magazines collection, and it explains The New Yorker’s workflow as well as the perils of “Shoot-the-Fact-Checker Syndrome.”
How Fact-Checking Works
Correcting Gender Inequity
The Interference Archive went on a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to help balance gender inequality on the site, which is overwhelmingly edited by men. Our own Sonya Chung writes on how to write across gender.
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“Madness and Meaning”
From Nebuchadnezzar to Hippocrates to the Victorian asylum: The Paris Review takes a look at mental illness and its treatments across the centuries.
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McGregor Adapting American Pastoral
This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Ewan McGregor will direct and star in an upcoming version of American Pastoral.
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NYRB Nu Classics?
The New York Review of Books is adding another imprint to its book publishing roster, but this one will be devoted entirely to ebooks.
Hanging Out with Alice and Margaret
A Year of Promise
Flavorwire has compiled a list of the best literary criticism of the year, ranging from Rebecca Solnit on Lolita to Elena Ferrante on literary publicity. Also check out this year’s most notable Millions pieces, from our star-studded Year in Reading to a literary reader for Lent.
One of the most fascinating glimpses into fact-checking is THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, which consists of the text of an article that John D’Agata published in THE BELIEVER and his often cranky but funny exchanges with the magazine’s fact checker, Jim Fingal; the email exchanges between D’Agata and Fingal take up much of the book than does the original article. (Complicating this whole question is that some accounts say that the exchanges in the book were written to represent the process of fact-checking, rather than being exactly the exchanges between D’Agata and Fingal.) Still, for journalism/writing/editing geeks, it’s a fascinating book.
I know this pushes the discussion away from the original post just a bit (fact-checking) but carrying this even further, into the whole question of “what is fact” in non-fiction, is an essay that appears on TriQuarterly, “The Facts of the Matter.”
Great point, Joe. Here’s that article in case anybody else is curious: http://triquarterly.org/essay/facts-matter
Also here’s Millions staffer Mark O’Connell’s review of THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT: https://www.themillions.com/2012/03/cool-story-bro-the-provocations-of-john-dagata.html