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Megan McArdle comments on a book review that bemoans its target’s many basic factual errors:

This is what fact checkers are for, and I don’t understand why book publishers don’t have them. They cost money, to be sure–but not that much money….A quarter of a million dollars a year would get you the world’s finest staff of crack fact checkers.

….Presumably the answer is that it isn’t economic: readers don’t care, and indeed rarely learn; there’s no money in preventing the occasional catastrophe []. But then one must turn the question around: why do magazines like The Economist, the New Yorker, and yes, The Atlantic, employ fact checkers? Our readers are the potential consumers of books like the one that the Economist is reviewing; do they care less about accuracy in their books than in their magazine articles?

Not that anyone at The Atlantic thinks about it that way; we employ fact checkers because it seems like the right thing to do. But why does this ethic prevail at so many magazines, and at no publishing house?

I have my doubts about this. When I think about the amount of work that MoJo’s fact checkers put into the 4,000-word articles I write, and then multiply that by 20 for the entire magazine, that’s a lot of fact checking. And it’s probably less than you’d need for the average 300-page nonfiction book. At a guess (since no fact checkers are checking this blog), I’d say that fact checking a book would cost upwards of $5-10,000, and considering that most nonfiction books don’t even make back their advances, that’s a lot of money.

But there’s another thing going on here as well: if a book has errors, people blame the author. They don’t generally blame Random House or Simon & Schuster. But if there are errors in a magazine, people blame the magazine. So magazines simply have a stronger incentive to protect their brand than book publishers do.

Beyond that, I suppose it’s just inertia: magazines have had fact checkers for a long time and book publishers haven’t. Any other ideas?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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