Tag Archives: new york times magazine

NY Times Mag publishes editors’ note for plagiarism similar to Dowd’s

July 20, 2009 – 1:15 pm

nytimesmagThe cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam “in joyous circles” after it was freed and “nudged” the divers gently, “as if in thanks”; that the divers thought it was “the most beautiful experience they ever had”; and that one diver said he would “never be the same” appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to The Times’s writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting. In seeking to confirm the accuracy of the article, Mr. Siebert read several accounts of the episode, including one published by The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2005 on which he based his retelling.

Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form. Link

Gawker notes that the paper’s reaction to Siebert’s transgression is very different from how it handled the Maureen Dowd incident back in May. From the Gawker post:

…it’s not different—at all—from what Maureen Dowd did in May, when she "inadvertently" copied an entire paragraph written by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall into her column. Dowd’s explanation for the slip was that she was "talking to a friend of mine…who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column…but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." We have to assume, giving Dowd the benefit of the doubt, that she was referring to an e-mail conversation, because it’s preposterous to imagine that her friend verbally recounted a 43-word paragraph word-for-word and that Dowd took it down in her notes as such. So it was an instance of a Times reporter unintentionally lifting language from an e-mail.

When Siebert does it, he gets a 232-word editor’s-note-lashing explaining, in finite detail, how the error happened. When Dowd does it, she gets this:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Major Errors, Newspapers, Plagiarism | Also tagged , | Comments

Photog working for NY Times Mag accused of manipulating images UPDATE: NY Times confirms manipulations

July 8, 2009 – 4:17 pm

nytimesmag(See update at the bottom of this post.)

A photographer whose work appeared in the New York Times Magazine has been accused of digitally manipulating his images. Edgar Martins produced a photo essay entitled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." It showed abandoned buildings/construction projects and was featured in the magazine and on the Times website. After commenters on MetaFilter raised questions about the authenticity of the images, the magazine pulled the slideshow from the website and inserted this text in its place:

Editors’ Note: July 7, 2009
The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered.

Adam Gurno, a MetaFilter user, is being given credit for helping expose the manipulations. He’s posted some evidence on his personal website and also did an interview with Minnesota Public Radio:

"It was an excellent photo essay," he told me this afternoon. "The picture of the framing is actually pretty striking. I looked at it and I said, ‘this doesn’t look right.’"

Gurno says he sent his proof to the Times but he only got a form e-mail in return. Nonetheless, the Times has removed the photo essay from its Web site.

How the ethical lapse came to light should be a warning to all journalists.

"When you work in computer programming…there’s a maxim in the programming world that says ‘all bugs are shallow to 10,000 eyes.’ It means if you have something open source and you let 10,000 people look at it, they’re going to find all the little things about it. Everybody’s going to approach it from a slightly different angle. And I think it’s the same with this picture," he said.

"I understand magazines Photoshop models on their covers and that’s neither here nor there. But when they actually call it ‘journalism,’ that’s when I decided to dig in a little bit extra," he said.

Gawker notes that Photo District News claims to have uncovered other examples of manipulation within the same photo essay. PDN also reprinted the text from the magazine that introduced the essay. Note the emphasis from PDN:

Last fall, The New York Times Magazine commissioned Edgar Martins, a 32-year-old Portuguese photographer based in London, to capture on film the physical evidence of the real estate bust in the United States. Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

Other media watchdogs are trying to get an official comment from the Times.

My guess is the magazine is examining the photos and talking with the photographer, and that it will publish a more detailed Editors’ Note once it makes a final determination. At this point the general consensus seems to be that the photos were altered, but the magazine and photographer have yet to confirm this. Either way, they should move quickly to make a more detailed statement. The story has already taken shape and doesn’t look good for the magazine.

UPDATE July 9: The Times has acknowledged that the images were altered by the photographer. As expected, here’s the Editors’ Note:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com titled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”

A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.

And a post on its Lens blog offers this admission, in addition to other background:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an accompanying slide show on NYTimes.com, “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age,” have been found to include digital alterations. The photos showed unfinished or unoccupied construction projects around the United States that came to a halt — at least in part — because of the financial crisis. They were taken by Edgar Martins, a 32-year-old freelance photographer.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines, Major Errors | Also tagged , | Comments

NYT Mag Editor’s Note details lapses in reporting, fact checking

April 13, 2009 – 8:00 am

nytimesmagYou’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.

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines, Major Errors | Also tagged , , | Comments

Naming names

October 27, 2008 – 8:00 am

The cover article on Page 52 this weekend about Senator John McCain’s campaign misspells the given name of Mr. McCain’s fellow senator from Arizona and the surname of the governor of Florida, both McCain supporters. The other Arizona senator is Jon Kyl, not John, and the Florida governor is Charlie Crist, not Christ. The article also misstates the name of the Ohio city where some McCain campaign staff members first met with Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. It is Middletown, not Middleton. And the article overstates the duties of Tucker Eskew, a member of Ms. Palin’s team. He is officially her counselor, not her chief of staff, though campaign officials say that he performs many of the same duties. Link

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Magazines | Also tagged , | Comments

A “know-it-all” reader gets a correction

June 30, 2008 – 8:00 am

An article last Sunday about the TV series “Mad Men” referred incorrectly to the history of original series on its network, AMC. “Mad Men” is AMC’s first scripted drama series; the show is not AMC’s maiden voyage in original programming. (That occurred with “Remember WENN,” a comedy about a radio station that ran on the network from 1996 to 1998 when it was known as American Movie Classics.) Link

This correction is notable because Gawker got a hold of a related email exchange between the article’s author, Alex Witchel, and the magazine’s research editor. (The reader who pointed out the error was mistakenly included on the exchange.) Here’s Witchel’s email to the research editor after being informed of the request for correction:

The research editor’s reply:

By Craig Silverman | Posted in Behind the scenes, Magazines | Also tagged | Comments