Lawrence Wright’s cover story in the current edition of The New Yorker reports on the Church of Scientology …

– via Fact-Checking The Church Of Scientology: Journalist Lawrence Wright, a story on NPR.org.

Many marvel over the magazine’s pedantic process for checking the facts in every article, caption, cartoon, poem and work of fiction. I dedicated a chapter of my book to fact checking, and recounted many of the amusing and apocryphal tales of checkers going far beyond the call of duty. For my research, I interviewed two fact checkers from the New Yorker, though only one spoke on the record. I had also approached Peter Canby, the head of the department and a senior editor at the magazine, for an interview. He politely declined.

Fortunately, we both delivered speeches at a recent fact checking conference in Germany, and I had the chance to speak with him. I also shot video of some of Canby’s interesting and amusing keynote speech. He began his talk by stating that it would be off the record, but I managed to get him to allow me to post a few excerpts. Three clips are below.

This one explains how they hire checkers, and the skills they look for:

Here’s some insight into what the magazine expects from its writers when it comes to fact checking:

Canby describes what he sees as the ultimate value of fact checking:

And so it was that I spent the last weekend of March in Hamburg in the offices of the famous German weekly magazine Der Spiegel as a speaker and participant in a conference dedicated to fact checking. I was of course at a disadvantage in that I was one of only four English-speaking presenters; the rest of the conference took place in German.

My fellow North American presenters were Peter Canby, a senior editor at the New Yorker who heads up its fact checking department; Sarah Smith, managing editor of the New York Times Magazine and a former fact checker at the New Yorker; and Scott Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and the leading newspaper accuracy researcher working today.

Nearly all of us who spoke in English couldn’t help but note what a pleasure it was to participate in, wonder of wonders, a conference about fact checking. God bless those crazy Germans. None of us were willing to offer the checker’s guarantee that it was the first ever such gathering on record, but it was the only one we could think of.

The real news of the conference, at least for us visitors, was the massive fact checking operation at Der Spiegel. The other bit of news was that Der Spiegel has a wonderfully outrageous cafeteria and meeting space. You can view all my photos on Flickr, but here’s a sample:

Can you imagine eating there every day? Just looking at it makes me want to buy some shirts with butterfly collars, and grow a moustache. But back to fact checking…

My colleagues from the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker were just as amazed as me to discover the German weekly has roughly 70 full-time people in its fact checking and research department, as well as others who work part-time. By comparison, the New Yorker has 16 checkers, including Canby, making it the major checking operation one of the major checking operations by North American standards. [Update/Correction April 9: Canby emailed to say Vanity Fair has over 20 checkers, making it larger than the New Yorker's department. That's why I struck the text above.]  You can read all about Der Spiegel’s checking in my new column for Columbia Journalism Review.

This slide, which was part of a presentation by the head of the magazine’s checking and research department, illustrated that Der Spiegel’s approach is to hire checkers who have specific expertise in different areas. Here’s a list of some of their checkers (to give you an idea, their medical expert/checker is a former physician):

Though Der Spiegel’s approach is unique, there is one way in which German fact checking is similar to what we have (or used to have)  in Canada and the US: it’s on the decline. Very few publications — someone at the conference estimated there are six in all of Germany — practice it. The tough economic times have resulted in the reduction of staff checkers, and those that are left are looking for new ways to justify their existence.

During my discussion with a Der Spiegel fact checker and the deputy head of the department, they said they are trying to use their internal database of information and sources to generate topic pages for the website. You can view the Angela Merkel topic page here.

For them, one way to ensure the survival of fact checking is to offer something other than checking and research. In short, they’re trying to generate content, not just verify it. The department is also hoping to save time and resources by moving away from paper-based checking and towards a digital workflow. If you wonder what I mean by paper-based, take a look at this slide showing an article that was worked on by a checker (click for larger):

In terms of English-language content, I shot a bit of video of Scott Maier’s talk about newspaper accuracy. He shared some of his research into newspaper accuracy in the United States. (I have more about this research here and here.) Here’s an excerpt:

One quote from Maier that stood out for me: “In America, journalists are better educated than ever,  yet the rate of error is higher than ever. Something is going wrong.” Also, here are photos of some of the slides that were part of Maier’s presentation. These will give you a quick and dirty look at his new data about Italian and Swiss newspaper (which has not yet been published). Click for larger:

Finally, for any German speakers out there, here’s a lengthy TV report about fact checking and the conference:

Fabricated interviews. The New Yorker carried a trio of pieces about an Italian journalist caught fabricating a surprisingly large amount of interviews with famous writers. And a German magazine also admitted that it had published a fabricated interview with Beyonce.

Plagiarism at the New York Times. The NYTPicker busted Times art Benjamin Genocchio critic for lifting from Wikipedia.

More Posner theft. Admitted serial plagiarist Gerald Posner is still making news. The Miami New Times uncovered more than 15 other examples of thievery.

(Also see the What I’m Reading sidebar to the right to check out some other recent articles of note.)

Hat tip to Gawker.

To my chagrin, I made an error in my New Yorker piece “None of the Above.” In the “Bell Curve,” Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein did not advocate a “high-tech Indian reservation” for low-IQ groups. Rather, they warned that if current welfare policies continued, we would end up having to build high-tech reservations for those with low IQs–which is a very different argument, obviously (although not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous). I regret the error. The New Yorker will be running a correction.

Excellent. Why not first publish a correction in the medium that’s immediately available, and then follow up with another in the original medium? Of course, it only works if you do both. But by placing a correction in more than one place, you increase the likelihood of readers receiving the correct information.

UPDATE Dec. 17: The magazine has published a correction:

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

As readers have noted in the comments, the error was quite serious. The correction in the magazine does a better job of communicating this fact. Though if I were one of the authors of The Bell Curve, I would have appreciated an apology.
Thanks, Ernest!