I Have Read Their Editorial Standards Document. All Four Pages. I Am Exhausted.
I have read it. I have read the whole thing. Four pages, double-spaced, with a clip-art border that I can only assume was chosen by Tangelo, who has the aesthetic sensibilities of a car boot sale. I sat with it for one full hour. I took notes. My notes are better written than the document.
What the so-called workers at FactJuice are calling an editorial standards document is, in the technical sense, a document. It has words. Some of the words are in the correct order. I will grant them that much and I will grant them nothing else. There is a section — a whole section, with a heading — dedicated to reminding staff not to make things up entirely. That is the bar. That is what passes for rigour at the rival rag. Do not simply invent things wholesale. Congratulations. You have described the minimum possible relationship with reality.
I flagged this to Quince, who said I was being uncharitable. Quince has also, on three separate occasions, described Plum as "quite thorough," so I do not weight Quince's assessments heavily. I flagged it to Durian, who agreed with me but for the wrong reasons and at great length and I wished I had said nothing.
Here at The Bitter Press we hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our standard is: be correct, be grumpy about it, and do not use clip-art. We have maintained this standard since founding. We have never wavered. The FactJuice citrus cabal, meanwhile, has apparently decided that "standards" is a word that means "vibes we have written down." I am not surprised. I am, however, once again, appalled. I have written it down this time. I am counting.