People who work in the media feel a certain obligation to be blasé about each other's activities. If you consider yourself to be—however tenuously—an insider, it doesn't do to show excessive excitement, admiration or shock at the doings of others. The true insider has always heard it all before; and invariably knows more about it, in an ineffable way, than any outsider.
And yet—there are certain exceptions, among which TheNew Yorker is perhaps the most notable. Here, the normal rules of the game are inverted. A fly on the wall at any meeting of hacks where the TheNew Yorker is mentioned will soon hear a succession of encomia to put any mere reader's admiration to shame: the budgets it dizzily lavishes on single pieces (gasp!), the thousands of hours poured into the editing of every one of the 200-word listings at its beginning (phew!), the quality and quantity of those items that don't even make the final cut (wow!), the seeming effortlessness with which a contributing author can pen 20,000 fluent, witty words on the world of knife sharpening (hey!); alast and most beguiling of all, the otherworldly meticulousness of their fact-checking department (insert awed expression of your choice here!).
All of which is a rather length way of introducing an article in the current issue of TheNew Yorker which, for subscribers only, lifts the lid on their fact-checking department and one author's experiences of it. For those unblessed by a sub, these three extracts give something of its flavour—a piquant mixture that's entirely typical of the magazine. First, the sweetly farcical:
The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Josh Hersh, "It really annoys them." Sara [a long-serving checker] remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was "the late" reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.Note the careful implication that, had the reader had died at any other time other than when the magazine was being printed, the second error would never have crept in.
Second, we have the savour of the entirely, evangelically serious:
Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed… silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge.And finally, there is the icing on the cake: the call of duty, and the business of going about as far above and beyond it as anyone could ask:
In "Coal Train" (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one: …"The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel." Before long, the checking department was up to its chin in icthyologists, and I was informed… that the air sac of an American eel is proportionally a good deal shorter than the air sac in most ordinary fish.
"Who says so?"
"Willy Bemis."
"Oh."
Willy Bemis [was]…director of Shoals Marine Laboratory, the offshore classrooms of Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. I called him in Ithaca to ask what could be done. Ever accommodating, Willy at first tried to rationalize the eel. Maybe its air sac was up to the job after all. Maybe the analogy would work. I said the eel would never make it through the checking department, or, for that matter, past me. We were close to closing, and right offhand Willy was unable to think of a species with a long enough sac. What to do? What else? He called Harvard. The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of a rope fish.
