Survey: Mag Editing and Fact Checking Standards Slack Online

As a freelance editor and copy editor, I cringed when I saw yesterday's NY Times article on a Columbia Journalism Review survey of consumer magazines and their web practices, which found inconsistent and rather lax standards in regard to editing and fact-checking online content.

Here's the scoop straight from the article:

• Copy-editing requirements online were less stringent than those in print at 48 percent of the magazines. And 11 percent did not copy-edit online-only articles at all.
  
  
• A similar trend held with fact-checking. Although 57 percent of the magazines fact-check online submissions in the same way they fact-check print articles, 27 percent used a less-stringent process. And 8 percent did not fact-check online-only content at all. (The other 8 percent did not fact-check either print or online articles.)

As CJR chairman Victor Navasky was quoted as saying in the NYT article: “One of the things that it appears to mean is that there’s this trade-off of standards for speed. The conventional wisdom is that you have to be there first in order to get traffic, and you need traffic in order to sell ads, therefore you do not have time to do conventional copy-editing and fact-checking.”

Ouch.

Today, the PDF of the report became available on the CJR website.

A note to all those consumer magazines that are struggling to squeeze in copy-editing and fact-checking before publishing content to the Web: there are plenty of incredibly talented freelance copy editors, proofreaders, and researchers ready to lend a hand.

You may have to pay us, but trust me, our skills are worth it when it comes to delivering quality content to your readers.