Reasons for picking up Writer’s Digest and Reader’s Digest
I didn't plan it this way, but I have work in the recent issues of both Writer's Digest and Reader's Digest (Canada). So October is all about the Digests, yo. The only hitch is that neither piece is online as of now. So you need to get the print editions. (Or buy the digital edition of WD!)
For Writer's Digest, I wrote an essay about my experience correcting errors in my book, Regret The Error. It's somewhat similar to the monologue I did for Definitely Not The Opera recently. One difference is that my WD piece offers advice to writers about preventing errors. And it includes an image of the accuracy checklist I produced earlier this year.
As for Reader's Digest, the current issue in Canada includes a lengthy excerpt from the Mafiaboy book. And Michael "Mafiaboy" Calce is on the cover. We're really thrilled about his.
My monologue about mistakes for Definitely Not The Opera
The most recent edition of the CBC Radio show Definitely Not The Opera focused on mistakes. They rang me up and asked me to come into a studio and talk about how I handled mistakes in my book Regret the Error. They recorded me and then cut my thoughts together into a little monlogue. I think it turned out pretty well and you can listen to it here. You can also download the full show on this page. Or use this link to grab the full audio file.
New column for Columbia Journalism Review Daily
If Regret the Error doesn't satisfy your interest in media errors and corrections, you should read my new weekly column for Columbia Journalism Review Daily. It's called -- surprise -- Regret the Error and runs every Friday on CJR.org.
I've written eight columns so far, and you can read them all here. This column is a chance for me to connect the dots and provide some context for notable corrections and errors. To give an idea of what I mean, here's an excerpt from my November 7 column:
Apologies Not Acceptable
Does The Washington Post apologize?
The Washington Post’s correction policy has some elegant turns of phrase, including “Preventing and correcting mistakes are two sides of the coin of our realm: accuracy.” But it says nothing about apologies. Could that be because “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize”?
That quote was attributed to a Post editor in an e-mail published by the Washington City Paper this week. The email was written by David Winer, the managing partner of EatWell DC, a restaurant group in the Washington area. He sent it to members of his company’s mailing list to respond to a scathing review published in the Post. Winer also contacted the paper to raise questions about the critic’s conflict of interest. As a result, the Post published this Editor’s Note:
Critic Tom Sietsema should have recused himself from reviewing the Commissary, a restaurant featured in the Oct. 29 Food section. He and one of the restaurant’s owners had earlier had a personal relationship. The Washington Post regrets that he reviewed this restaurant, and will remove the review from its online archive.
Here’s how Winer’s e-mail described the conversation with Sietsema’s editor, Tom Shroder:
Mr. Shroder, understanding the ramifications of Mr. Sietsema’s actions offered a settlement; kill the story on the web immediately, print a retraction in Sunday’s paper, and that neither Mr. Sietsema nor any member of The Washington Post food team would ever write about any Eatwell DC restaurant again. What they would not do is apologize for the harm caused by Sietsema’s spurious comments. “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize” but “we will say we regret”.
I’m not aware of any other media organization that has a “no apologies” policy. Plenty of other newspapers have no problem apologizing. Some have even apologized for things that happened decades or even centuries in the past. But it’s true that the Post almost never apologizes.
A Nexis search turned up Post articles offering advice on how to apologize, as well as editorials and columns that judged other people’s apologies. The closest I came to a recent apology was a letter to the editor published in September of last year, written by by an op-ed contributor who wanted to apologize for an error:
I apologize to MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough and to The Post for the cutting description of Mr. Scarborough in a Sept. 7 op-ed, “Guilty in the Duke Case,” by me and KC Johnson about the Duke lacrosse case. I wrote that description on the basis of transcripts of “Scarborough Country” programs early in the Duke case. My attention has since been drawn to transcripts of several subsequent programs, and I realize that Mr. Scarborough was one of the handful of journalists who deserve credit for calling attention early in the case to the emerging evidence of innocence.I am very sorry that because of insufficient research, the op-ed suggested otherwise.
STUART TAYLOR
Washington
In September, Tom Sietsema, the food critic at the center of the controversy, offered a correction and apology while doing a chat with readers on the Post’s Web site. Here’s the exchange:
Point of Correction: Jared Slipp was the GM at the late and much missed Nectar. Danny Boylen was the notable GM of Notti Bianche in the same space.Tom Sietsema: Right you are. My apologies.
But that’s not the same as an apology made by the paper. In order to find an example of the newspaper making a formal apology for an error it had committed, I had to go back to an article published on July 17, 1977. The headline was “An Apology and a Salute To 2 Pilots Named Stinson”:
Katherine Stinson is not dead, even though her photograph was prominently displayed on The Washington Post’s obituary page yesterday,” it began. “And even as The Post apologizes for its error, it salutes the achievements of both Katherine Stinson and the subject of the obituary, Katherine Stinson Otero. The two women shared not only names, but also remarkable aviation careers in a time when no one had heard of a women’s liberation movement.
That appears to be the only relatively recent example of the paper giving an apology the headline treatment, though there have been other variations on the theme. “Apologies to Monty Bessicks of Cushman & Wakefield, whose name was unrecognizably mangled in a recent column item about his job switch from Galbreath Co.,” read an August 1997 correction.
“WE WISH to correct an error in yesterday’s observations here on the consolidation that is rapidly changing the defense industry,” read a March 1994 editorial. “We should have said that it was Loral Corp. (not Martin Marietta Corp.) that bought LTV’s missile division two years ago. We got it wrong, and we apologize.”
There were a few other examples where the word apology appeared in a correction, but nothing was more recent than the 1994 editorial. And in the end, they were corrections, not apologies. So, given the example from 1977, perhaps the correct way for the editor to have described the paper’s policy would be: “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize anymore.”
Love from Time
Time magazine has named 25 blogs to its First Annual Blog Index and, joy of joys, Regret the Error made the cut. I'm very surprised, not to mention thrilled that my site is listed among personal favorites like Lifehacker, Gawker, Boing Boing, and Radosh. The Regret entry is here, and you can also add your personal rating for the site. Vote for me!
This is the write-up:
Mistakes happen, especially in the media. Everyday, thousands of bonehead mistakes are printed in newspapers and magazines and go out over the airwaves, and only a tiny fraction of the errors are ever corrected. Regret the Error is the media consumer's revenge, a regularly updated compendium of media mistakes big and small. The big mistakes get plenty of coverage elsewhere — the plagiarized newspaper columns, the fabricated news sources, the memoirs that are — how shall we put this — totally made up. Regret the Error covers the big whoppers, but it really shines on highlighting the small stuff that the media gets wrong. Small, that is, unless you're the person being written about. There's a useful yearly roundup of errors, corrections, and plagiarisms, and some of that material has been compiled into a book. Read 'em and weep.
Regret the Book
Oh boy have I been derelict in making updates to this site. So what's been going on?
My book is out, has received some very nice reviews and media coverage, and led to me appearing on the December 23 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources program. Watch the segment below and marvel at how pale I am. Hey, it's winter in Montreal.
I've also pasted some excerpts of reviews and coverage for the book below. You can also read my latest round-up of the year in media errors and corrections on the Regret the Error website.
Selected reviews and comments:
...a winding journey through the most glaring, damaging and humorous typos, misprints, misidentifications, fuzzy numbers and obiticides in the history of journalism, from the accidental to the malicious. These chapters are chock-full of amusing historical anecdotes, including the story behind the incorrect headline Dewey Defeats Truman, the case of mistaken identity that galvanized Nobel to create his prestigious awards, and the oft-presumed dead but still living Abe Vigoda. Silverman injects plenty of humor, but mostly he is deeply concerned about the science of journalism, and at the heart of this romp is an argument for increased public participation in the news cycle. -- Publishers Weekly
The extensively researched work delves into the history of accuracy and errors in journalism, seeking answers to why errors occur, their impact on the credibility of journalism, and what can be done to both minimize mistakes and learn from them. The book connects the dots between newspaper accuracy, errors and corrections, and media credibility – and ultimately the survival of newspapers in a media-saturated world where trust and credibility are our most important assets. -- Toronto Star
“Regret the Error” is a compendium of published media corrections, many of them hilarious. But Craig Silverman, a journalist who founded the Web site RegretTheError.com, turns what could have been a sudsy little stocking stuffer into a serious study of why journalists fail so often. He also lays out a sensible, brain-driven plan for reform, starting with a “systems approach” to accuracy. -- American Journalism Review
In his new book "Regret the Error," Craig Silverman, a young Montreal journalist, explores this world of press errors and corrections big and small. He laments changes in newspaper finances and production methods that have stretched reporters and editors, and reduced the scrutiny of the printed word. -- The Oregonian
Other comments/reviews:
-"Regret the Error works because of Silverman's incisive but good-natured voice as an advocate for old-fashioned verities like accuracy and honesty (add transparency to the stew as well)...Regret the Error is not an indictment of the media, or an apologia, but a reminder that -- in this age of instantaneous news, citizen publishing and online scoops -- getting it right still counts for something."
-"Silverman’s book also offers a series of recommendations to improve accuracy. Among his useful ideas are better training in interviewing and note-taking; accuracy checklists and a 10-minute fact-checking period before reporters turn in copy; greater use of anti-plagiarism software; increased post-publication surveys of sources to monitor accuracy; and random fact-checking of one story from each section of every issue. These are not only good ideas, they can actually be implemented in any newsroom at little or no cost."
Austin Hill turns the tables on me
From 1999 until the summer of 2002, I worked in the communications department for a software company called Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Radialpoint). This trip to the other side of the media divide (I was working as a freelance journalist prior to taking the job) was a wonderful experience for me, and one of the best parts was working with all of the great people at the company. One of those folks was Austin Hill, who co-founded the company along with his father and brother.
Austin is now at work on Akoha, his latest tech start-up, and he's also blogging up a storm here. Austin has started doing interviews with folks in the Montreal tech and blogging community and he recently put me in front of the microphone. You can read the interview here. (I sent him one of my new, professional-looking headshots for the interview, but he opted instead for one that features me having way too much fun at a company holiday party from years ago. Damn you, open bar!) Give it a read, and I highly recommend Austin's blog to anyone interested in the technology/entrepreneurship/start-up scene.
Regret Runner Up; Twitter
The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards were announced on Monday. Regret the Error was up for Best Canadian Weblog and was defeated by the lovely folks at Drawn.ca. Always the runner up for Best Canadian Weblog, never the...you get the picture. It was an honor just being nominated, though it's a shame I didn't win; Julien Smith, podcaster extraordinaire, was on hand at SXSW to accept for me. He was instructed to act like a drunken fool on stage. Your loss, SXSW. Congrats, Drawn!
Oh, and I've begun to Twitter here.
It’s Crunk Week
This week I published my third annual round-up of the year in media errors and corrections at Regret the Error, as well as my second annual plagiarism round-up.
Reaction has thus far been very satisfying. I made this year's Crunks the longest version ever (over 8,000 words) and included some new awards and features. Give it a read.
Below is a sampling of media coverage. I'll also be on CBC Radio's The Current next week, and on NPR's On The Media in a few weeks. More links will be added as they emerge.
- Romenesko
- Gawker
- Fark
- USA Today
- BoingBoing
- Editor & Publisher
- The Times (UK)
- Alternet
- Daily Telegraph (UK)
- Detroit News
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Huffington Post
- Kottke.org
- Jossip
- Metafilter
- Pajamas Media
- AOL
- Daily Kos
- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
UPDATE Jan 11: Okay, I'm not going to go too crazy with the vanity links on this post, but here's a link to an interview on NPR's On the Media, and a link to an Associated Press article.
PC Magazine discovers Regret
PC Magazine's annual "Top Web Sites" round-up includes a plug for Regret the Error. The magazine named it
one of the Internet's "Top 99 Undiscovered Web Sites." Well, it's nice to be found. My site is one of four news sites selected by the magazine in the feature. Here's how the magazine explains the idea behind its list:
"...Obviously, you've probably heard of at least some of these sites
before, and some have thousands of registered users. But we're betting
that most of them will be new to a majority of our readers. If you've
heard of some of these, consider yourself an active Netizen. If you're
already familiar with all of them, please send us your resume because
you are truly the master."
Chicago Sun-Times story about plagiarism
I was recently interviewed for a Chicago Sun-Times story about plagiarism. The story, by Mike Thomas, appeared in Sunday's paper and contains a lot of good information and insight about the recent rash of plagiarism. (I wrote about this disturbing trend for The Huffington Post.) The article is not online, but here are some key excerpts:
Steal traps: Sleuthing software makes it easier than ever to catch a plagiarist, so why do writers keeping ripping off the words of others?
Like bird flu and Arctic temperatures, plagiarism is on the rise. More than ever, it seems, writers siphon stuff from the Internet, books, magazines and newspapers and pass it off as their own, apparently oblivious to the seriousness of this ethical lapse -- not to mention the hailstorm of shame and criticism it invites.
A sampling of recent alleged offenders -- thanks in part to whom the media's credibility collapse continues -- includes an undergrad novelist at Harvard; a longtime reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; a scriptwriter at NBC; a reporter at the New York Post, and (accused just last week) conservative columnist Ann Coulter. They belong to a club whose membership roster is long and occasionally luminous.
Here's the head-scratcher: Despite a higher-than-ever likelihood that plagiarists will be outed by keen eyes with access to Google (plug in a phrase and let the magic begin; software takes mere seconds or minutes to scour databases to pinpoint pilfered passages for vigilant overseers who smell a rip-off artist), writers and reporters continue to steal away.
And while the conscious or unconscious rehashing of previously penned words and sentences certainly falls under the plagiarism umbrella, as does the sloppy rewriting of Wikipedia copy (ditto), they aren't what floor me most. (I'm also inclined, for the purposes of this piece and in general, to omit obvious literary and musical homages. Sometimes Dickens and Zeppelin say it best.) What I'm really flabbergasted by is the blatant, almost unfathomable lifting of original material in mass quantities -- entire paragraphs and pages, word for mother-loving word.
In shoplifting terms, that's like walking into a department store, donning the garment of your choice and sashaying out the front door like you own the thing. Only at most places, they'd nab you in a nanosecond. In the journalistic and literary world, it can take years.
According to the Web site www.regrettheerror.com, which exhaustively catalogs media screw-ups, there've been 12 incidents (in case you're wondering, that's a lot) of high-profile plagiarism so far in 2006, including New York Post scribe Andy Geller's June 9 piece on the dead terrorist honcho Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Per a June 27 Daily News account gloatingly headlined "Copycat Postie put on ice for a month," Geller was suspended "after the newspaper discovered he copied massive sections of an article from the New York Times." Once more, for emphasis: "Massive sections." My own comparison of the two articles verified it.
'What are the punishments?'
"Every case is just a bit different from the other, but you can't seemingly categorize them," said John Lesko, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Saginaw Valley State University. In his spare time, Lesko edits the scholarly journal Plagiary, www.plagiary.org, and runs the Web site www.famousplagiarists.com, which has "a backlog of cases" waiting to be posted.
"Now and then you have cases where genuine mistakes have been made and people forget to put something in quotations," he said. "But then you have cases where people seem to keep doing the same thing over and over again. It's almost like they're wanting to be caught."
Although several of the authors, journalists, politicians and business titans who've been caught with their proverbial pants (or skirts) down have paid the price with lost jobs, canceled book contracts, tarnished reputations and extended leaves of absence, plagiarism remains an arbitrarily punishable act for lack of a standard penal code.
"We need a systematic investigation of plagiarism in publishing today," said Poynter Institute senior faculty member and writing coach Chip Scanlan. "If we put a criminal justice overlay, we need to know: Is there a plagiaristic misdemeanor? Is there a plagiarism felony? And if so, what are the punishments?"
"You can see incidents that may be very similar, and in one case the person is fired and in another case they're suspended," said Craig Silverman, a free-lance writer who helms regrettheerror.com. "Or sometimes you get one of these mealy-mouthed explanations saying, 'It was an accident, and because of that they've been reprimanded,' and that's it. And I think that's really disturbing to readers, because if they spot a few different incidents and if they happen to read about them and they see that there's this total lack of a standard in how to handle it, it makes them think the media is very haphazard in the way it punishes something that is really one of the high crimes of the industry."
That some filchers get a gentle "tsk, tsk" while others are dragged through the mea culpa wringer isn't surprising. What is surprising, however, is that so few effective measures are taken by media outlets big and small to stop this shady practice before it starts. Or before it leaves the building, anyway.
Rocked by scandals, major papers such as the New York Times and USA Today have hired watchdogs who keep eyes peeled for copycats and deceptive behavior in general. The Times also hits its prospective free lancers with the following query: "Has anything you've written later resulted in a published editor's note or retraction for deliberate falsehood or plagiarism or become the subject of a lawsuit involving allegations of deliberate falsehood?"
As if thieves would cop to thievery.
And some book publishers, presumably, are a bit warier these days following the Kaavya Viswanathan chaos that swirled around Little, Brown and Company in April when it was discovered that the 19-year-old Harvard student pinched parts of her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life from another author. (The earlier James A Million Little Pieces Frey debacle at Random House/Oprah was a jolter too, but at least the words in question were his.) Among glossies, mags such as the New Yorker and Harper's famously have teams of dedicated fact-checkers who vigorously vet copy by, for example, calling sources to confirm quotes and details.
An ounce of prevention
Across the board, however, they're the exception. Many publishing houses, magazines and newspapers, including the Sun-Times, don't have the time, resources or, let's face it, the inclination to adopt a blanket pro-active approach -- to zero in on every single sentence and ascertain its originality. Overworked editors are one line of defense, but they're only human.
Take those in the newspaper realm. Countless thousands of phrases pass before their eyes every day. Stories require line editing, copy editing and layout, which leaves little time to notice whether or not a writer has cribbed from CNN.com or the Daily Kos. Even if there were ample opportunity to do so, what person on earth has every book, magazine, newspaper, journal and Web site cataloged in his/her brain and so thoroughly memorized as to immediately perceive suspicious similarities?
And so, for better or worse, it falls on the writer to straighten up and fly right before things take a nose-dive. Then again, that may be asking too much.
"The reason [plagiarism] happens is because we are not attacking it before the fact," said Scanlan, whose journalism advice column appears at www.poynter.org...
"We're not transparent enough," he continues. "I think we need to say, 'Look, it's easy to plagiarize. It's easier than ever. You can cut and paste things. And if you don't understand the concept of intellectual property, if you don't understand what it means to plagiarize -- that it means the theft of someone else's words -- you need that driven pretty deep into you.' "
Silverman is of the same mind. "The reality is that errors, plagiarism and fabrication do occur more often than anyone is comfortable with," he writes in an e-mail, "and yet I'm unaware of any newspaper that has integrated a truly rigorous fact-checking or authorship program to prevent these changes. Checking eveything in the paper is not realistic, but more can be done, and I think that technology can play a major role."
...Largely ignoring the 800-pound monkey on their backs is one way of dealing with it.
"There's an institutional aspect of it, where if you're running a newspaper or you're running a book publishing company and somebody you employ or one of your writers plagiarizes, you kind of want to believe that it's not true," Silverman said. "Especially if they're somebody who's been with you a long time. And so I think there is a natural human desire to want to find an explanation and say, 'Oh, it was accidental or inadvertent.' And that's very harmful. Sometimes hope overtakes what the reality is. If you want to look at plagiarism as a sickness, I think denial is definitely one of the symptoms."
More than ever, though, it's detox or die.
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
Recent Writing/Work- Dumb Blonde Story : CJR
- Error Prevention Made Easy : CJR
- Standard of Living
- Mission: Quality Control : CJR
- CBC.ca Video
- The Asshole Barrier
- Get More Done « Unlimited Magazine
- All the news you can produce: 'Citizen journalism' goes (semi) pro - The Globe and Mail
- Multitasking Myths and the Argument for Slow Work « Unlimited Blog
- Canoodling co-workers: Sign on the dotted line - The Globe and Mail