NYT Article: It’s a Fact: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

[German Translator]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books-errors.html


Interesting quote:

The economic realities of commercial publishing — an unpredictable business that often relies on outsize hits and blockbuster authors — make routine fact-checking difficult. Rigorously fact-checking a book-length manuscript, which can involve calling sources and reviewing notes and documents, can cost tens of thousands of dollars, the equivalent of a modest author advance.

[Eric Thomson]

Meh.  Schadenfreude is one of the best German words I know.  If the trad pub industry can't do their due diligence, then they deserve to wear it, and watch their business model fail.  Considering the amount of effort I put into producing a quality product, I find my field of f**ks fallow when I read this sort of article.

[David VanDyke]

I wonder how much those Manhattan offices and executive salaries cost...

[LilyBLily]

Some sampling would probably tell the tale in most cases, because outright shoddy research makes itself very evident to any editor and it's so easy now to google all sorts of primary sources. That's not the same as paying someone to check everything. No one in trad publishing wants to pay anyone significant money to do that. The only sure way to get a publisher to spend on fact checking is to strongly suggest that it will be sued otherwise. Then the publisher will send the ms. to an attorney who may by whatever means decide that large or small portions of the text must be deleted.

[Simon Haynes]

I'm pretty sure my trad contract had a clause which stated that I took responsibility for the accuracy of my own work. It probably doesn't work like that in practice though, because lawyers know it's the publisher who usually has the deeper pockets.

[LilyBLily]

Yep. They sue the company, and all the named executives, and the author. The publisher can settle unilaterally and stick the author with the cost. That's what the indemnity clause is all about. In practice, it is seldom employed, but it definitely is a clause with teeth.

[Dormouse]

With the internet error checking should be simpler, but it is actually harder because so many online sources are wrong.
**** is more instantly profitable than error checked news.
The main change is that publications and institutions which used to check scrupulously no longer do.

I feel the article is itself more a product of publicity seeking than rigorous data gathering and fact checking.
The main error with Naomi Wolf was brought about by a combination of bias and insufficient expertise, but it would never have been found by a fact checker  - it needed peer review. Errors like this will always occur, and always have occurred.

As an aside, if that article had been published in the UK, it would probably have been flagged as antisemitic because of its choice of initial examples. I assume that's not seen as a potential issue in the US or New York.