A few weeks ago I conducted an unscientific poll on the CUE listserv, asking editors about their pre-publication review policies. That is, do they permit subjects and sources of stories to read the story prior to publication? Thirty-six editors responded. Of that self-selected sample, 27 submit all or part of stories for pre-publication review, six do not, and the other three . . . based on what they told me I couldn’t figure out what they do. This survey has all the statistical credibility of a BP press release, but it suggests what I had already suspected: pre-publication review is prevalent among university magazines.
Several editors surprised me with notes that more or less said, “Of course we allow our sources and subjects to read the story. Don’t you fact-check?” This equation of pre-pub review with fact-checking needs to be examined. They are not the same. Checking and double-checking the accuracy of our stories is essential. Many of the stories we publish report on complicated scientific and medical research, and on scholarship that is not easily grasped, not to mention matters of public policy or institutional policy. Precise wording and accurate details are essential. But fact-checking can be accomplished without granting pre-publication review. I always check the accuracy of details with my sources, including the factual content of quotes. If I paraphrase a source, or summarize some aspect of what the source told me, I check that thoroughly as well. I will discuss with sources and subjects what I see as the essential points of a piece. I check my work against documentation all the time. But at my magazine, we maintain an editorial policy of not granting pre-publication review.
Why not? What’s the harm?
The harm, I think, is to our standing as professionals, and that is not a minor thing. University magazines produce the highest-quality work, and thus best exemplify and promote the excellence of their parent institutions, when they are allowed to approach the work as professional journalists. And it is part of journalistic professional practice to not show stories to sources before publication. No matter how strongly you stipulate that you are showing a piece to a source only for verification of accuracy, you are implicitly inviting everyone who reads the story to approve it, advise on how it should be written, and grant permission to publish it, and all those things undermine our standing as professionals. That in turn undermines our ability to argue for the freedom to publish substantive, credible stories that will be read because they matter and because our readers trust how they were produced. We don’t advise chemists, physicists, surgeons, literary scholars, historians, biologists, or mathematicians on how best to do their work. If we genuinely believe that what we do merits professional respect and an essential measure of autonomy, why do we so willingly accede to non-journalists telling us how to do our jobs?
There will be occasional touchy stories that senior administrators (and the legal department) will insist on reviewing. That’s just something we all live with, including my magazine, and I don’t think that’s improper. At Johns Hopkins Magazine we routinely give our bosses a heads-up if a potentially controversial story is in the pipeline. They respect us as pros, and in return we respect their desire not to be surprised by what shows up between our covers.
Editors who work for bosses who require pre-publication review obviously do what they must, and do their best to preserve the integrity of their contents. I don’t dispute that many editors successfully guard their stories from being compromised by review. But I do have one last provocative question: If you never encounter reviewers who insist on substantial revision of your stories, might it be because you’re not producing stories that are sufficiently substantive or challenging?
Tags: fact-checking, pre-publication review, professional standards
Regarding your last provocative question: Perhaps you need to consider that some of your professional writer and editor colleagues are actually doing their jobs well, producing stories that are sufficiently substantive, challenging, and accurate.
I was married for 30 years to an award-winning journalist; a regular dinner-table topic involved the differences between what he did and what I, working in nonprofit communications, did. There is a difference!
As college/university magazine editors we may employ expert journalistic skills, but, honestly, would we ever publish, for example, a muckraking expose about our own organizations? Don’t think so. We are, ultimately, in the PR business.
So the fact that we’re in the PR business means we don’t ever write substantive, challenging, life-changing articles? Hmm, I’ve certainly read some of those in certain alumni magazines.
When I became a journalist many years ago, I didn’t realise that muckraking was the only legitimate form of writing. If that’s the case, I’ll call myself something else….
1) I don’t believe the good university magazines are in the PR business. They may serve a PR function, for sure, but they are credible, valid magazines, not PR kits tarted up to resemble magazines.
2) Tina Owen’s point is well taken. Umags don’t launch a lot of investigations, but that doesn’t preclude genuine magazine journalism.
3) Muckraking? Not much. But in the case of Johns Hopkins Magazine, as the example nearest at hand, when an all-American lacrosse goalie was arrested and charged with rape, we reported it. And when a flawed Hopkins research protocol killed a young research study volunteer, we didn’t just report it. We put an 8,000-word piece on the cover, a piece that went into detail about the flaws in the protocol, the flaws in the review system, the excruciating internal and external reviews, the whole tale. We have written features on why Hopkins is so expensive, questioning the tenure system, student complaints about how lousy life can be for an undergraduate at research university, and why Hopkins has made so little progress on gender equity issues during the last 20 years. All of those stories ran on the cover.
Notre Dame courageously tackled the issue of Catholicism and homosexuality. Duke did, as I recall, two extensive stories on the false rape accusations directed at its lacrosse team.
A point I’ve made to newspaper reporters who were quick to dismiss institutional journalism as mere flackery: Imagine you’re a reporter for The New York Times, and every story you write is about The New York Times Company. That’s our situation, and there are many, many examples of university magazines doing an exemplary job of maintaining their journalistic integrity.
Yes, yes, and yes. We do use the tools and perspectives of legit journalism and maintain journalistic integrity.
On the other hand, if our employers didn’t think the magazines served to strengthen the school’s support and accrued to the bottom line, there would be no magazines. Our core business is not journalism, but education.
To bring this back to the subject of pre-publication review, there will always be a dance and tension between running this and that fact past a source and showing the source the actual content. There will also be a a few problems arising when you paraphrase material to be checked without using the “precise wording” you consider paramount. That’s a good way to create a crack through which the truth can fall.
Above all, I disagree that showing something to a source is an implicit invitation for approval, advice and permission. It is what the writer says it is: a request to check factual content. If you stand firm as tweaked quotes and convoluted wording come back, it remains just that.
Reporters are great at talking a tough line about pursuing the truth. They should be able to take a tough line when the words actually start hitting the page and sources start to squirm.