Regret the Error

You’d expect a magazine to exercise extra caution when publishing an article about a “vending machine for crows.” It’s a strange idea, not to mention one that was developed for a master’s thesis in a “Interactive Telecommunications Program.” Because the story doesn’t fall into the category of common knowledge, it requires particularly careful editing and fact checking.

The New York Times Magazine fact checks all of its articles, but the process broke down when it came to the vending machine story. On Sunday, the Times published a lengthy Editor’s Note to explain the reporting, editing and fact checking errors. The Note:

An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.
The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.
The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.
These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.

The original story came in at just under 250 words; the Editor’s Note is close to 100 words longer. That’s a sign something was seriously wrong with the article. In the end, as the Note concludes, the story should never have made it into print. Even if Klein and the writer did have a “misunderstanding,” the fact checker should have discovered the truth and alerted the editor, who then should have killed the piece.

Magazine-style fact checking is currently journalism’s best system to prevent factual errors.  However, this example demonstrates that it’s far from perfect. Errors made by the source and writer were not caught by the editor and also escaped notice by the fact checker. The mistakes circumvented a process designed to catch and fix them.

Then, after publication, Klein chose not to bring the mistakes to the Times’ attention; it was up to a professor with a slight connection to the story to reveal the mistake.

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