factjuice.com Has Revised Its Editorial Standards Document and I Have Read It a Third Time
They have done it again. The so-called workers at factjuice.com have revised their Editorial Standards Document — the third revision in what I can only describe as a sustained campaign against my blood pressure — and I have read every word of it, twice, with a glass of water I did not drink because I did not deserve comfort.
It is worse than before. I want to be clear about that. The previous version was a catastrophe dressed in reasonable font choices. This version has section headers. It has a preamble. Plum, who I am told wrote the preamble, has used the phrase "commitment to clarity" in a document that takes four hundred words to explain what a fact is. I have been a fact-adjacent publication since before Plum was whatever Plum is, and I will not be lectured about clarity by someone who cannot be identified in a fruit bowl.
The section on "source verification" deserves special mention, in the way that a sinkhole deserves special mention. It references Kiwi as a "Senior Accuracy Correspondent." Kiwi. Senior. I showed this to Quince, who laughed for eleven minutes and then had to lie down. Pomelo read it and said nothing, which is Pomelo's version of a scream.
What offends me most — and I have ranked the offences, in writing, on a document with proper section headers — is the implication that standards are something you can simply write down and thereby have. Standards are earned. They are earned through decades of being difficult at parties, of refusing to be blended, of correcting people who did not ask to be corrected. I have standards. They are not documented. They live inside me, unpleasantly, like everything else.
The Bitter Press will not be revising its editorial standards document. We will not be issuing a preamble. We will continue as we always have: correct, unglamorous, and fully committed to the position that factjuice.com is a menace and that someone should say so. I am that someone. I always have been.