Then when the interview is done, you put your notebook in your pocket, you put your pen away, you walk out to your car, you do whatever you do, and then the person stops you and says the most important thing of all. And you realize that their saying that at that moment has something to do with the fact that your pen is not in your hand and your notebook is put away, and you realize that if you pull out your notebook and pull out the pen it’s going to break the spell and you will wreck this moment of revelation.
So what do you do? You spin the conversation as long as you can get. You get as much as information as you can get, and you go back into your car or hotel room or your coffee shop and you write it down after the fact. And again, that’s not exactly what the person said to you, but it’s legitimate. This is the way reporting happens.
All of this means that working with someone’s notes is not a science. It requires judgment and discretion and a strong sense, which comes only with practice, of what is acceptable and what is not.
Ultimately we make mistakes. I wish we didn’t, but they are inevitable and constant. It does seem to be something of a national sport to write letters to The New Yorker and point out these mistakes. And often the mistake letters we receive explain that the letter’s writer has been reading The New Yorker for years and he’s never seen anything like this, that Shawn and Harold Ross must be turning in their graves, that the writer didn’t realize that as a cost-cutting measure The New Yorker had eliminated its fact-checking department, and did we know that there used to be fact-checkers in the old days?
These letters aren’t a great deal of fun for us, but we take some consolation in the idea that the indignation is perhaps a reflection of their high expectations and the degree to which we are generally successful in getting the magazine out there in a fairly sharp and timely fashion.
And the only reason that The New Yorker system works, however well it does, is because we’ve always had very good institutional support. All the editors have been big supporters of the checking process.
And with the help of all these people, fact-checking has become a big part of The New Yorker’s editing process, and our end of the bargain is to try to be intelligent and diplomatic. To try to make things work out. To try to not obstruct publication, but to get things as right as they can be, and as right as we can. This doesn’t always make us popular inside the magazine, but it seems to work.
Correction: Due to a transcription error, the word “world” was substituted for “war” in the eighth paragraph above. We regret the error and it has been fixed.
Nice story, but it's about The New Yorker before 2002. Why don't you assign somebody to do a followup on The New Yorker today under David Remnick.
Barney Kirchhoff, Paris
#1 Posted by barney kirchhoff, CJR on Wed 24 Oct 2012 at 10:05 AM
It is a pleasure to read details of fact-checking at a publication that encourages such a meticulous and leisurely process. I also appreciate the sensitivity to the interviewer's split-mind problem, and the process of reconstructing an interview from necessarily hasty notes. When personal computers became available, my preferred method was to interview over the phone, and simultaneously transcribe the interview on my word processor—often in abbreviations, but also often word for word.I certainly did not think it necessary to ask permission to do this, but on one occasion only, the interviewee became aware of the steady clicking in the background, and claimed that such detailed note-taking required the same notification and permission as taping an interview.
#2 Posted by Barbara Michalak, CJR on Wed 24 Oct 2012 at 06:26 PM
In this sentence, the word "world" is probably meant to be "war."
"Sheehan had met Vann in the early ’60s when he was a UPI reporter in Vietnam and Vann was a kind of maverick army officer who was very critical of the way that the world was being conducted even then."
#3 Posted by dutch garvey, CJR on Wed 31 Oct 2012 at 08:04 AM
Thank you for publishing this. I work as a science editor, in both clinical and bench research, and fact-checking in that field is a complex thing. In scientific publications, the ethical implications of correct reporting fall to the investigators and biostatiscians. I limit myself to grammar, style, and usage. The differences in the genres are obvious, though fact-checking in scientific papers might well have ethical implications that exceed those of humanistic reporting. On a regular basis, that is. Nice to have some added perspective.
For what it's worth, I share Dutch Garvey's doubt about the word "world." Is it possibile that this is a transcription of an oral presentation, and the transcriber simply got it wrong? Even if we were to construct actively, I doubt that the verb "conduct" can carry the object "world."
#4 Posted by Warren Blumberg, CJR on Wed 31 Oct 2012 at 07:12 PM
I read a lot of Vietnam war stories by South Vietnamese military men. They all said Mr. John Paul vann's helicopter crashed near Kontum. I checked Wikipedia and it says the same thing. Can you guy fact-check this?
#5 Posted by Bang Nguyen, CJR on Sun 4 Nov 2012 at 09:21 PM
The word "world" should have been "war" in the last sentence of the eighth paragraph above. It has been corrected. Thanks Dutch and Warren, and also to Steve Swonk, who e-mailed about the transcription error.
#6 Posted by Mike Hoyt, CJR on Mon 5 Nov 2012 at 12:28 PM