Translation from English

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Business Magazine..North Greenwich Village HQ

I think it says something that my father never subscribed to Forbes even though it probably would have been good for him to do so...he did too much by instinct when it came to business decisions of any kind, and was so often wrong. Ordinarily a shrewd judge of other people, for some reason he could let the most obviously least likely people get him involved in business schemes with them...

Someone once said to me, "when people have this idea they might somehow be able to make a lot of money, all their common sense goes out the window."

I am not sure Forbes still has this building on Lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village as their HQ...maybe they still own the building though...wait, just got around to checking on the internet and it looks like they still say 90 Fifth Avenue, so I guess this is still their official center..

I wonder if there is any good objective description of Forbes magazine anywhere...let me look--

Well, there are a number of critiques on the net..this from 2010 from Salon magazine...but I have always felt Salon has an obvious liberal bias, so caveat emptor:

“Don’t they fact-check this stuff?”
This is the perennial cry of the outraged reader and the wronged article subject. The latest party to raise the fact-checking howl is the White House, which yesterday went public with its discontent over Forbes’ ludicrously poisonous new cover story.
The article depicts President Obama as a deranged anti-colonialist whose ideology of business-hatred was somehow implanted, “Manchurian Candidate”-style, by the estranged father who abandoned him when he was 2. (Imagine, if you will, a leftist critique of George W. Bush that attributed his torture policies to secret indoctrination in his father’s CIA dungeons. I know, I remember reading that cover story too…)
I’ll let others do the actual point-by-point refutations of the Forbes article. I want to come at this story from two other angles.
First, that question about fact-checking: four times out of five, the answer to it is “No, they don’t.” Much of the public still believes that “fact-checking” is actually a routine part of news journalism, and most journalists aren’t in any rush to bust the myth, but myth it is.
There are two types of “fact-checking”: One is a formal procedure of the news work-flow, where somebody with the title of “fact checker” actually attempts to verify every single fact in a piece. This is the sort of thing the New Yorker is famous for. It used to be the norm at glossy magazines, but the norm is decaying in this era of media-business meltdown. I did fact-checking work at the start of my career, as many journalists did, and it’s a good discipline, but an increasingly rare one.
The other sort of fact-checking is the more informal spot-checking that has always taken place in daily newsrooms and today is common in the better online operations. This is fact-checking by smell-check, for the most part — story editors and copy editors (where they still exist) backstopping beat reporters, looking up stuff that sounds wrong or that’s in some sensitive area. Informal spot-checking is vital but necessarily spotty. Stuff slips through. That’s why we have corrections. (We need more.)

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