So, an amazing detail inside @taffyakner's superb profile of Gwyneth Paltrow: She initially planned to do a Goop magazine with Conde Nast. But the deal broke down because Conde insists all articles be fact-checked; Paltrow refused. nytimes.com/2018/07/25/mag… 1/x A few thoughts ... 
First, there's a striking resonance between a) Paltrow's refusal to have her unscientific woo verified by fact-checkers b) the language of today's right-wing conspiracy theorists: "We’re just asking questions," as Paltrow's business partner says. 2/x
Secondly, I'm *really* glad and impressed that Conde Nast insisted on fact-checking. I write for Wired, published by Conde Nast, and like all reputable US magazines it has a fact-checking phase built into the production of every article. How does it work, you may ask? 3/x
Basically, every piece I write for Wired (and for every reputable US magazine) goes like this: i) I do my reporting, calling people up and reading papers, and I write it. ii) The editors edit it, passing it back and forth between us as we add new material, cut, rejigger. 4/x
Then after the editors and I are happy with the piece, iii) we give it to a fact-checker. Most of the fact-checkers are full-time employees of Wired (or the other magazines); sometimes they're freelancers. I start by giving them everything I used to report the article ... 5/x
... i.e. any papers or books or articles I consulted; contact info for anyone I quoted in the piece, or even paraphrased information from. The checkers read everything I read, and call up every source to re-verify that what I wrote checks out. 6/x
It's an impressively thorough process. The checkers at these magazines are *phenomenal*: They find all the small errors (misspelled names, slightly off numbers or dates, etc.); they less frequently find more-consequential errors, as when it turns out I misunderstood ... 7/x
... a finding in a study, or misapprehended something an interviewee told me. Good checkers sometimes are so thorough and fantastic in their research that I've sometimes had them suggest an even more interesting detail from deep inside a scientific paper that I overlooked. 8/x
As a writer, it's an *amazing* feeling to publish something knowing that someone has been tasked with very aggressively and pointedly finding all the mistakes I've made -- either through haste, blunder, honest misunderstanding, what have you. 9/x
I should point out that no other media I'm aware of does this level of aggressive checking of facts than US glossy magazines. Newspapers and TV don't (they're moving too quickly); daily blogs don't; no documentary I've ever been interviewed for came back do checking. 10/x
Book publishers don't either. I hire my own fact-checking teams to do a Conde-Nast/NYT-mag-level checking process for my books. After 25 years of having every word I've published in magazines get checked, I hate the feeling of publishing without it. 11/x
This is why, BTW, if you're looking for a reliable source, glossy US magazines are the most factually reliable media product in existence, full stop. 12/x
They certainly can make mistakes! Even with this process in place. And of course each publication has tunnel vision at the meta level -- they ignore *huge* areas of stories because they're doing a narrow beat, and too often have very homogenous staffs. 13/x
But at the level of the individual fact in any individual sentence or paragraph, US glossy magazines are generally very solid -- and probably an order of magnitude moreso than other media. 14/x
All of which brings us back to Paltrow, Goop, and the pseudoscientic nonsense she so frequently passes off. In "wellness" and health, as in politics, if you *refuse* to submit to a good fact-checking process, nobody should trust you. 15/15
