9 ms·

Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

59 points by howsilly 7y ago

wwqrd 7y ago
I'd settle for spelling and malapropism checks.
- carlmr 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure if this is true, but I have the impression the error rates have increased in the last decades, despite spell-check becoming more effective at finding them at low cost.
  - jfk13 7y ago
    Most publishers seam too have decided its knot worth employing copy-editors any moor.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      There are some publishers I won't even buy books from anymore, because I've paid too much money for books that are so rife with typos and nonsense that it was clear that it never even touched the inbox of an editor or a proofreader.
  - __s 7y ago
    I recently read all of Philip K Dick's novels. Spotted typos in every book. I log typos in my goodreads reviews In the past it wasn't even the author's fault necessarily. The worst case of this was an anthology of Ursula Leguin, "Five Complete Novels" where I quit recording the typos as there would be multiple per page
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      If the typos are in a legitimate eBook copy, it's because sometimes the people who make the eBook don't have the source file(s), and instead have to OCR a printed book. If the typos are in the printed book, that's bad.
- budu3 7y ago
  Well in their defense, we don't want to pay for newspapers and so you can argue that this is the result of a lack of resources.
  - h4waii 7y ago
    If you can't provide a quality service cause nobody is willing to pay for it, end your service. Rip the bandage off. At the very least, end it on a high note that you can be proud of -- don't let it degrade slowly until people are openly mocking it.
ANPEQ-1 7y ago
It is always entertaining when the 'newspaper of record' shames other publications for their mistakes and failings.
- ReptileMan 7y ago
  They are working hard to lose the newspaper of record status. They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and blamed it on editorial process. Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told others she had no recollection of the alleged incident. Their editors, they say, removed the reference. “It was just sort of. . . in the haste of the editing process,” said Pogrebin. Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.
  - 5trokerac3 7y ago
    You're going to get downvoted for sharing wrongthink and not screaming "hate!" at Goldstein... I mean Kavanaugh, but you're ultimately right. The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.
  - hkhanna 7y ago
    > Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness. This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors. If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go. Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.
darkerside 7y ago
I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era.
- carlmr 7y ago
  >This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era. It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channels.
  - GrinningFool 7y ago
    > Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
    - NetToolKit 7y ago
      > which would then publish them Only if the newspapers themselves allowed it. Newspapers could suppress public criticism that came their way through this channel if they so chose.
      - jfengel 7y ago
        For a long time, there were multiple newspapers in each city. They would love to catch each other in mistakes. If one paper wouldn't publish criticism, the others would. These weren't just yellow-journalism tabloids, but two or even three genuine competing reporting organizations. They fought to be the first to publish, but couldn't afford to simply publish falsehoods, or fail to admit mistakes. Not that they were paragons of honor all the time. They're humans. But it did set up a pattern of keeping each other honest, which they maintained to a large degree after they could no longer sustain multiple papers. That has diminished substantially as they're competing against Internet-style "move fast, break things, nobody cares what you wrote yesterday" publishing (and before that, 24 hour TV that wants to present a constant crisis so that you must never turn it off). So there was less "suppressing public criticism" than you seem to be implying. It happened, to be sure, but it was very different from the current self-swallowing echo chambers you get today -- at least among the major newspapers. Modern journalism, even the comparatively mainstream stuff, has a lot more in common with those yellow journalism tabloids.
buboard 7y ago
This was inevitable and is the culmination of two things: - Too much hypothesis-driven science that results in statistically significant, but untrustworthy results. It's easy to find statistically significant data to backup whatever crazy thing your brain comes up with. - Too much pseudo-scientifically backed popular press. Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers.
- heymijo 7y ago
  > Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers. Wow, never seen this worded so clearly before. Thanks for the great summation buboard!
- Finnucane 7y ago
  Some years ago, when I was working as production editor in New York, I had to manage a manuscript for a book of new-age woo that was trying to pass itself off as pseudo-science (one of these 'quantum magic' type books). Not only was the premise crap, but the author clearly did not understand even basic historical facts about science. I brought this up with the editor, who seemed surprised to be told that the author did not know what she was talking about. I'd guess the editor had not really read the manuscript very closely. I worked with the copyeditor to try to straighten some of it out, but it was pretty much futile. The NY publishing system is set up so that editors spend most of their day doing tasks unrelated to actually editing their books, of which they have too many. It gets worse as you go up the food chain.
  - coreypreston 7y ago
    Was the book ever published?
    - Finnucane 7y ago
      Yes.
- 7y ago
NavekM 7y ago
The Naomi Wolf one is most excruciating listen on radio I've ever heard. https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/1131702577878503425 https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/113170257787850...
- RankingMember 7y ago
  Awkward surely, but in this day and age I can at least give her credit for listening and not trying to bluster past it like so many public figures when confronted with inconvenient facts.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
Add to this Richard Dawkins new book, "Outgrowing God" which is rife with inaccuracies, baseless conjecture about the motivations behind some of the ancients civilizations he talks about (an assyriologist posted a pretty pointed takedown of some of the inaccuracies on twitter https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440 https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440), and theology so bad you would question whether or not he himself has ever actually opened up a Bible.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  Great... so now I can't trust Richard Dawkins OR the people who review his books.
  - tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
    As the twitter thread notes, he seems to have gotten some of his historical information about ancient Mesopotamia from a website called historywiz (https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm), which I suppose is good if you are writing a 8th or 9th grade paper on the topic, but not a book.
    - Shorel 7y ago
      Interesting and informative. However your previous remark about Richard Dawkins opening up a Bible is a bit worrying. It is obvious that the missing historical information is not in the Bible, and that remark can be interpreted a bit like the point of view of Jehovah witnesses, that all you need to read is the Bible.
      - zaque1213 7y ago
        I think their statement about Dawkins’ apparently having never opened a Bible was in regard to his theological understanding, not historical. Having read Dawkins, my primary critique of him overall is that he regularly demonstrates a willful ignorance as to what religious people actually believe. He’s content to attack straw men and not the propositional truth claims at the heart of religious belief.
dhosek 7y ago
I'm intrigued by the claim of "dropped footnotes" (and its passive construction). How exactly were these footnotes dropped? There seems to be an implied blame of the word processing software and I find that rather dubious.
ratsmack 7y ago
I have a problem with "news" sources that don't allow commentary on their articles. It seems that many eliminated the comment sections when the articles were too often found to be incorrect and/or pushed a blatant narrative, rather than just reporting the facts.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Also when they'd get filled with comments from the "other side" of the political spectrum. Re: just reporting the facts. Look in a journal or in data tables for facts. News is propaganda to sell newspapers. Everything else is secondary to that for them.
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  That's my impression too, specifically with the Guardian. If I'm not mistaken, you used to be able to comment under most articles, then they started to disable comments under articles on "inflammatory" subjects (read: about immigrants etc.) and now you can hardly ever comment. Which makes sense, because o lot of their articles would be just torn to pieces if commenting was allowed.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I wish there was some mention of major newspapers in this. It seems like a glaring omission. Through all the "fake news" stories in the last years, I have yet to see someone like NYT openly talk about e.g. the gell-mann amnesia effect that the rest of us so openly agree is a thing.
the_watcher 7y ago
> But a factual controversy can also be costly, driving down sales and, in extreme cases, forcing the publisher to recall and destroy finished copies. Are there examples of this happening? Michael Wolff's book was a bestseller, for example, despite many of the factual disputes coming up prior to its release. In theory, lack of fact-checking would seriously hurt a traditional media outlet, as it could reduce traffic or subscriptions. For authors, however, it's not exactly the same calculus. Once the book is sold, it's sold (I realize it's a bit more complex than this with advances and returns, my point is that convincing someone to keep paying them monthly isn't a concern). Once they become a best-seller, they'll be able to put "best-seller" in their "About the Author" section. While there's a future credibility argument (which can be partially mitigated by the value of being a "best-selling author"), I'd argue that from a pure "maximize returns from this publication" perspective, there's really only an incentive to fact check things that are so egregious that it could lead to a recall or stop the book from being published in the first place. This is not a good situation to be in, but the job a publisher is hired to do is to take a manuscript and turn it into something that can be sold in bookstores. I'm not really sure that it should be their role to police this, unless it's published by a media outlet explicitly as journalism.
btrettel 7y ago
Even in science there is too little due diligence. I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a factor of about 4 due to a math error. Out of the hundreds of people to examine this result, I think I'm the only one to notice the error. I spent a fair amount of time checking the literature to make sure I'm not crazy but seems no one noticed the problem. A result being highly cited is no guarantee that it's correct.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  Is that "off by a factor of 4" result still "useful"? Can you still create products/devices/things/science with that incorrect result? Even epicycles still allowed reduced-accuracy prediction of the movement of heavenly bodies
  - btrettel 7y ago
    Yes and no. The result was a factor of 4 too high (edit: 3.3, to be more precise), which is conservative for certain applications. But for those applications I'd argue that you are typically confident that your device is in the atomization regime a priori and don't need to check. But it's extremely inaccurate for my application, where you don't want your device to be in the atomization regime. In fact, I only started examining this in more detail because my own experiments clearly contradicted the textbooks, review articles, etc. If someone blindly applied this result then they'd potentially make a bad device.

59 points by howsilly 7y ago

wwqrd 7y ago

I'd settle for spelling and malapropism checks.

carlmr 7y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is true, but I have the impression the error rates have increased in the last decades, despite spell-check becoming more effective at finding them at low cost.
- jfk13 7y ago
  Most publishers seam too have decided its knot worth employing copy-editors any moor.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    There are some publishers I won't even buy books from anymore, because I've paid too much money for books that are so rife with typos and nonsense that it was clear that it never even touched the inbox of an editor or a proofreader.
- __s 7y ago
  I recently read all of Philip K Dick's novels. Spotted typos in every book. I log typos in my goodreads reviews In the past it wasn't even the author's fault necessarily. The worst case of this was an anthology of Ursula Leguin, "Five Complete Novels" where I quit recording the typos as there would be multiple per page
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    If the typos are in a legitimate eBook copy, it's because sometimes the people who make the eBook don't have the source file(s), and instead have to OCR a printed book. If the typos are in the printed book, that's bad.
budu3 7y ago
Well in their defense, we don't want to pay for newspapers and so you can argue that this is the result of a lack of resources.
- h4waii 7y ago
  If you can't provide a quality service cause nobody is willing to pay for it, end your service. Rip the bandage off. At the very least, end it on a high note that you can be proud of -- don't let it degrade slowly until people are openly mocking it.

ANPEQ-1 7y ago

It is always entertaining when the 'newspaper of record' shames other publications for their mistakes and failings.

ReptileMan 7y ago
They are working hard to lose the newspaper of record status. They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and blamed it on editorial process. Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told others she had no recollection of the alleged incident. Their editors, they say, removed the reference. “It was just sort of. . . in the haste of the editing process,” said Pogrebin. Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.
- 5trokerac3 7y ago
  You're going to get downvoted for sharing wrongthink and not screaming "hate!" at Goldstein... I mean Kavanaugh, but you're ultimately right. The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.
- hkhanna 7y ago
  > Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness. This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors. If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go. Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.

darkerside 7y ago

I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to deal authors and journalists? I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials. This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era.

carlmr 7y ago
>This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era. It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channels.
- GrinningFool 7y ago
  > Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
  - NetToolKit 7y ago
    > which would then publish them Only if the newspapers themselves allowed it. Newspapers could suppress public criticism that came their way through this channel if they so chose.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      For a long time, there were multiple newspapers in each city. They would love to catch each other in mistakes. If one paper wouldn't publish criticism, the others would. These weren't just yellow-journalism tabloids, but two or even three genuine competing reporting organizations. They fought to be the first to publish, but couldn't afford to simply publish falsehoods, or fail to admit mistakes. Not that they were paragons of honor all the time. They're humans. But it did set up a pattern of keeping each other honest, which they maintained to a large degree after they could no longer sustain multiple papers. That has diminished substantially as they're competing against Internet-style "move fast, break things, nobody cares what you wrote yesterday" publishing (and before that, 24 hour TV that wants to present a constant crisis so that you must never turn it off). So there was less "suppressing public criticism" than you seem to be implying. It happened, to be sure, but it was very different from the current self-swallowing echo chambers you get today -- at least among the major newspapers. Modern journalism, even the comparatively mainstream stuff, has a lot more in common with those yellow journalism tabloids.

buboard 7y ago

This was inevitable and is the culmination of two things: - Too much hypothesis-driven science that results in statistically significant, but untrustworthy results. It's easy to find statistically significant data to backup whatever crazy thing your brain comes up with. - Too much pseudo-scientifically backed popular press. Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers.

heymijo 7y ago
> Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers. Wow, never seen this worded so clearly before. Thanks for the great summation buboard!
Finnucane 7y ago
Some years ago, when I was working as production editor in New York, I had to manage a manuscript for a book of new-age woo that was trying to pass itself off as pseudo-science (one of these 'quantum magic' type books). Not only was the premise crap, but the author clearly did not understand even basic historical facts about science. I brought this up with the editor, who seemed surprised to be told that the author did not know what she was talking about. I'd guess the editor had not really read the manuscript very closely. I worked with the copyeditor to try to straighten some of it out, but it was pretty much futile. The NY publishing system is set up so that editors spend most of their day doing tasks unrelated to actually editing their books, of which they have too many. It gets worse as you go up the food chain.
- coreypreston 7y ago
  Was the book ever published?
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    Yes.
7y ago

NavekM 7y ago

The Naomi Wolf one is most excruciating listen on radio I've ever heard. https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/1131702577878503425 https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/113170257787850...

RankingMember 7y ago
Awkward surely, but in this day and age I can at least give her credit for listening and not trying to bluster past it like so many public figures when confronted with inconvenient facts.

tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago

Add to this Richard Dawkins new book, "Outgrowing God" which is rife with inaccuracies, baseless conjecture about the motivations behind some of the ancients civilizations he talks about (an assyriologist posted a pretty pointed takedown of some of the inaccuracies on twitter https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440 https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440), and theology so bad you would question whether or not he himself has ever actually opened up a Bible.

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
Great... so now I can't trust Richard Dawkins OR the people who review his books.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
  As the twitter thread notes, he seems to have gotten some of his historical information about ancient Mesopotamia from a website called historywiz (https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm), which I suppose is good if you are writing a 8th or 9th grade paper on the topic, but not a book.
  - Shorel 7y ago
    Interesting and informative. However your previous remark about Richard Dawkins opening up a Bible is a bit worrying. It is obvious that the missing historical information is not in the Bible, and that remark can be interpreted a bit like the point of view of Jehovah witnesses, that all you need to read is the Bible.
    - zaque1213 7y ago
      I think their statement about Dawkins’ apparently having never opened a Bible was in regard to his theological understanding, not historical. Having read Dawkins, my primary critique of him overall is that he regularly demonstrates a willful ignorance as to what religious people actually believe. He’s content to attack straw men and not the propositional truth claims at the heart of religious belief.

dhosek 7y ago

I'm intrigued by the claim of "dropped footnotes" (and its passive construction). How exactly were these footnotes dropped? There seems to be an implied blame of the word processing software and I find that rather dubious.

ratsmack 7y ago

I have a problem with "news" sources that don't allow commentary on their articles. It seems that many eliminated the comment sections when the articles were too often found to be incorrect and/or pushed a blatant narrative, rather than just reporting the facts.

lallysingh 7y ago
Also when they'd get filled with comments from the "other side" of the political spectrum. Re: just reporting the facts. Look in a journal or in data tables for facts. News is propaganda to sell newspapers. Everything else is secondary to that for them.
burntoutfire 7y ago
That's my impression too, specifically with the Guardian. If I'm not mistaken, you used to be able to comment under most articles, then they started to disable comments under articles on "inflammatory" subjects (read: about immigrants etc.) and now you can hardly ever comment. Which makes sense, because o lot of their articles would be just torn to pieces if commenting was allowed.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I wish there was some mention of major newspapers in this. It seems like a glaring omission. Through all the "fake news" stories in the last years, I have yet to see someone like NYT openly talk about e.g. the gell-mann amnesia effect that the rest of us so openly agree is a thing.

the_watcher 7y ago

> But a factual controversy can also be costly, driving down sales and, in extreme cases, forcing the publisher to recall and destroy finished copies. Are there examples of this happening? Michael Wolff's book was a bestseller, for example, despite many of the factual disputes coming up prior to its release. In theory, lack of fact-checking would seriously hurt a traditional media outlet, as it could reduce traffic or subscriptions. For authors, however, it's not exactly the same calculus. Once the book is sold, it's sold (I realize it's a bit more complex than this with advances and returns, my point is that convincing someone to keep paying them monthly isn't a concern). Once they become a best-seller, they'll be able to put "best-seller" in their "About the Author" section. While there's a future credibility argument (which can be partially mitigated by the value of being a "best-selling author"), I'd argue that from a pure "maximize returns from this publication" perspective, there's really only an incentive to fact check things that are so egregious that it could lead to a recall or stop the book from being published in the first place. This is not a good situation to be in, but the job a publisher is hired to do is to take a manuscript and turn it into something that can be sold in bookstores. I'm not really sure that it should be their role to police this, unless it's published by a media outlet explicitly as journalism.

btrettel 7y ago

Even in science there is too little due diligence. I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a factor of about 4 due to a math error. Out of the hundreds of people to examine this result, I think I'm the only one to notice the error. I spent a fair amount of time checking the literature to make sure I'm not crazy but seems no one noticed the problem. A result being highly cited is no guarantee that it's correct.

mrguyorama 7y ago
Is that "off by a factor of 4" result still "useful"? Can you still create products/devices/things/science with that incorrect result? Even epicycles still allowed reduced-accuracy prediction of the movement of heavenly bodies
- btrettel 7y ago
  Yes and no. The result was a factor of 4 too high (edit: 3.3, to be more precise), which is conservative for certain applications. But for those applications I'd argue that you are typically confident that your device is in the atomization regime a priori and don't need to check. But it's extremely inaccurate for my application, where you don't want your device to be in the atomization regime. In fact, I only started examining this in more detail because my own experiments clearly contradicted the textbooks, review articles, etc. If someone blindly applied this result then they'd potentially make a bad device.