What makes it stranger is that this story is appearing in a publication, identifying an unserved market, without any hint that they themselves would publish exactly what they say is missing. That is a story I'd like to read, and I might even click on a Pando link to read it.

Journalism and creative writing are not the same thing. Journalism of the form found in the New Yorker requires financial investment, in the form of funding travel, and in the form of funding full-time fact checking.

Also, if you think that startups are not-immediate-money-driven, I would disagree.

Perhaps the model of full-time fact checking needs to change?

I've been a fact checker at a magazine. My job consisted of calling sources up, and asking them each line of identifiable facts - to see if they actually said this, or whether this person's birth date is actually x month, y day, z year. Whether the moon really was waxing on this time of this month like the writer said in the article. Whether Nasa did publish this photo on this day, and where?

I'd say make mandatory fact checking a prerequisite of the writer's submission. All forms of public/recordable and fact-checkable (inventing a new word here) resource must be recorded, logged, delivered in electronic form for searching and listening.

For those cases where you can't keep these records, you won't be able to "fact-check" them anyway.

For actual facts and events, historical records, etc - I'd say we have a whole internet that is waiting to connect us with the actual people who it happened to. Use skype to call direct contacts, heck, I'd even support the New York Times creating their own verified wiki. Fork wikipedia and create a journalism-standard wiki.

I can't believe that the NYT hasn't actually done this yet. It's so obvious - they have teams of people on fact-checking duty. Create places where these facts that are gathered don't just disappear into the air after this issue is printed. Keep everything. With the cost of electronic storage so cheap, I highly believe that we can keep every single fact that we check, together with references and probabilities of accuracy and correctness (ie this factoid came from a scientist, maybe it's true. But now, I have found this paper that shows these equations and has been peer reviewed by these additional scientists and debated by these media and these researchers, then perhaps I can rate this to be more believable than just what the scientist said.)

These are all doable things with the amount of resources we have.

Just missed opportunities.

So creating a fact checking Stack Exchange, like the one recently created for crowd sourcing prior art for patents.

If you just kept an eye out for recent updates and looked to see who had added them you could totally beat someone to a scoop. Or am I missing something?

You could, but if each "Question" was only one specific fact, and the people asking were anonomised and time-order-randomised then you would have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get the scoop. Plus if you published a 'scoop' ahead of the facts being checked, and one of the 'facts' ended up being bogus, then it wouldn't be any better than repeating a press release or re-blogging someone else's story.

that's why I put not-immediate-money driven in the "writers" section, not the ycombinator/startup section. reading?

Yes journalism and creative writing are not the same - so why did the article refer to them as "New Yorker style"? My goal in my comment was to point out that for many New Yorker style pieces of writing, journalism and creative writing blends and cross polinates at that level - for example, Ernest Hemmingway is probably one of the best know "creative writing" novelists - but he is also a journalist for the Toronto Star churning out war stories day in day out. Why does the New Yorker always seem to have the most well written articles and a more nuanced team of editors? Perhaps because the editors don't treat journalism and creative writing any different from the viewpoint of standards.

Any good piece of publishable journalism must stand on its own as a piece of creative non-fiction as well. The writer must be writing creatively, as well as journalistically. We're not trying to fill an about.com article here, neither are we writing a blurb that will go in tomorrow's paper.

That's how you get Pulitzer winning articles. And that's what's missing in the popular debate about long-form journalism.

Everyone talks about journalism, the gathering of news, the interviews. No one talks about advancing the state of writing, using a new point of view in writing about the news, using different words, tenses, perspectives, metaphors and writing techniques. Even though many people want to divorce the two, they go together, hand in hand.

Textual journalism without the skill of writing is boring. And we have a lot of boring writers out there.

Sara's article just pointed that out. She should learn to write better :)

BTW, New Yorker had great fiction podcast: http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction