Just The Facts at The New Yorker?

In this week's New Yorker, Nicholson Baker has an “Annals of Reading” essay on the Kindle. While rounding up the hype, Baker mentions the machine's—and he normally uses "machine," instead of Amazon's "device"—surprisingly good sales, ending the paragraph with this:

(See the YouTube video called “Jeff Bezos Laughing Freakishly Loud on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”)
Baker goes on to walk us through the Kindle world, covering everything from its packaging to its most devoted users to the "bi-stable microspheres" powering its display. For the most part, he avoids the larger debates about ad revenue or attention spans. The result is fresh, focused, and well worth your time, as Baker's prose and eye for detail both inform and entertain. (Two favorite examples, with the caveat that they suggest a more negative essay than the one Baker wrote: "Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of"; "This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?")

Before I got to all this, though, I followed Baker's suggestion: I went to YouTube. It turns out there's no video named “Jeff Bezos Laughing Freakishly Loud on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," but YouTube quietly tapped me on the shoulder and suggested “Jeff Bezos Laughing Freakishly Hard on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” I don't know how to verify what video Baker's referring to, other than sending an email to The New Yorker that will probably never get read. Still, the "Freakishly Hard" one is the only match I could find; it dates back to February of this year, when other sites linked to it under that title; and it's picked up more than 2000 views since I started writing this. Suffice it to say that Baker probably misquoted the video's title—a small thing, to be sure, except that this is The New Yorker, which means one of the Four Fact-checkers of the Apocalypse also misquoted the video's title.

The Internet teems with attacks on The New Yorker's fabled fact-checking department. This won't be one of them. I think fact-checking represents a useful and important process, if also a sticky one—starting with questions like “What is a Fact?” Surely a title is a fact, whether it refers to a YouTube video or to Hamlet; yet Hamlet’s had a lot of different titles over the years.

On this and other counts, The New Yorker generally errs on the side of compulsion. Earlier this year, John McPhee wrote a fascinating essay about the fact-checking of one paragraph from his own 1973 story. In their commitment to accuracy, fact-checkers clearly protect and improve their magazine, even if that commitment is also what makes them vulnerable to so many small attacks. Of course, McPhee’s story reveals another reason why they’re vulnerable—the slightly self-congratulatory nature of all this. How did they fact-check the essay on fact-checking? Did a second fact-checker call the fact-checker around whom the story revolves, or did she fact-check it herself?

The point is, The New Yorker’s obsessive fact-checking forms an important part of the its mythology. McPhee cites one example where a New Yorker story referred to the "late" resident of a certain nursing home; the resident, who was both alive and a subscriber, demanded a correction, which The New Yorker provided in its next issue—but not before the resident died.

It’s easy to see how this provides a great service—and also an expensive one. In the early 1990s, Tina Brown doubled the number of fact-checkers to 16; David Remnick says there’re now “about 20 young employees in their twenties, who specialize in a variety of fields.” For this reason, I imagine, fact-checking has remained primarily a feature of print, with no place in the barrel-scraping online economy. Even online establishments like Slate and Salon put the fact-checking impetus on the writer.

Back to Baker for a moment. I said he doesn't really take up "the larger debates." And what side would he choose? Here's an author who, in 2001, wrote Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, a strong argument for preserving the printed word; then again, in 2008, he wrote an essay, “The Charms of Wikipedia," in which he confessed to editing under the name of "Wageless." (This seems related: I love that, in his Kindle piece, Baker test-drives some unabashedly trashy stuff—too many writers, when offered one of these experiential essays, seem to spend all their time reading Rimbaud and Homer. To which I say, bullshit.)

But if Baker maintains a refreshingly holistic view on all of this, a divide between print and online still exists—and his YouTube mistake is a great example of it.

Fact checkers must adore the Internet, even if they can't depend on it. Thanks to online resources, The New Yorker's fact-checking department no longer needs to be "equipped floor to ceiling with telephone books," as it was in McPhee's 1973. But the Internet, and online publishing more specifically, should do more for fact-checkers than speed up their work. It ought to enable a symbiotic relationship and a better final product—because if fact-checking's great, and if the Internet's great, they're best served together.

Let me give two examples. First, online additions and corrections come more easily and more visibly. Just in case, I did send an email to The New Yorker about Baker's video, and I can update this essay with any response. Also, if I've completely blown this and overlooked a "Freakishly Loud" video, I can acknowledge my error within its original context. Second, online publishing makes it easier to show your work. A great example of this (and of so much else) is the "Prominent former fact-checkers" subhead to Wikipedia's entry on "Fact checker"; after most names, there are links to the various resources—often contributor bios, but also interviews, a TV transcript, a profile in an alumni magazine—that contain the career histories.

I admit that neither point is particularly original, but they're worth revisiting in a discussion of fact-checking, and especially of The New Yorker's fact-checking. After all, the magazine is not only a symbol of fact-checking, it's a symbol of print. The online version of Baker's essay does not include a single link. Obviously, The New Yorker is not opposed to linking (their blogs link all the time), but they're also not taking full advantage of online publishing, even if it is their secondary medium. If, in preparing their online edition, the editors at The New Yorker had tried to link directly to the “Freakishly [Whatever]” video—if linking to sources were as integral and automatic as fact-checking—they would have caught their own mistake.