Wall Street Journal: Publishers Say Fact-Checking Is Too Costly byJeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Publishers Say Fact-Checking Is Too Costly
By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 30, 2006; Page B1

Last Thursday, publishing-industry veteran Nan Talese was excoriated on television by Oprah Winfrey for publishing James Frey's 2003 "A Million Little Pieces," a bestselling memoir about the author's struggle to overcome drug dependency that he has since admitted is partly fictitious.

But on Friday morning, Ms. Talese walked into 22nd-floor offices in Midtown Manhattan to a standing ovation from her colleagues. Soon afterward, she received a call of support from Peter Olson, chief executive of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Inc. publishing arm.
[Nan Talese]

"I've gotten more than 500 emails over the last few days, and the overwhelming majority have been supportive," says Ms. Talese whose imprint, Nan A. Talese, is part of Random House's Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group.

Indeed, many members of the publishing industry have rallied around Ms. Talese and Random House, saying that they would have published "A Million Little Pieces" as well and could have been duped just as easily. Unlike journalists, publishers have never seen it as their purview to verify that the information in nonfiction books is true. Editors and publishers say the profit-margins in publishing don't allow for hiring fact-checkers. Instead, they rely on authors to be honest, and on their legal staffs to avoid libels suits. "An author brings a manuscript saying it represents the truth, and that relationship is one of trust," says Ms. Talese.

But now there is a growing chorus both inside and outside the industry calling for publishers to take more steps to validate the authenticity of works that are marketed as nonfiction. "This is a breach of ethics, and who addresses that, whether it's the editor, the agent, or the publisher's legal counsel, is yet to be determined," says Lorraine Shanley, a principal in the industry consulting firm Market Partners International Inc.

Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, declined to comment on the suit because the company hasn't seen it.

Some publishers say the "Million Little Pieces" incident may well result in some changes in how books are vetted. "The entire process will have to be rethought," says James Atlas, president of Atlas Books LLC and the author of "My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale" a memoir published last year by News Corp.'s HarperCollins imprint. "Publishers will scrutinize far more closely what they publish, especially in the realm of memoirs. But short of having some kind of honor code I don't see what can really be done except to exercise far greater vigilance."

Some do. Jeff Kleinman, an agent with Folio Literary Management, said publishers could add a clause to the author's warranty section in their contracts, stating that to the best of the writer's knowledge the facts in the book are true. "The point being, if the author's found to egregiously misrepresent the facts, the author could be sued for breach of contract," said Mr. Kleinman via email. "Wouldn't that be a lot simpler than asking an agent, or even a publisher, to verify and fact-check every book?"

There will be more sensitivity to the issues of truth and fact, predicts John Sargent, CEO of Holtzbrinck Publishers, a unit of Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH whose imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Henry Holt, and St. Martin's Press. "For some books it will be possible, and for others, frankly, it won't."

Some authors note that the opportunity to stretch the truth is far greater in memoirs than in nonfiction books that cover well-known public events and people. "There's a built-in checking in that kind of business. It's to a certain extent adversarial," says Richard Reeves, the author of 11 books and a visiting professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "But when somebody is writing about their own life, there is no natural adversary or interested party who will come after them. That's why some of these things happen."

Other nonfiction authors say the James Frey incident illustrates that publishers in general are devoting far more resources to marketing books than editing them. "There's less editorial process now, dramatically, compared to 25 years ago," says David Halberstam, author of "The Best and the Brightest" and numerous other titles. "All the money goes into marketing to get books onto television." He says that publishers' desire to get authors onto broadcasts like Ms. Winfrey's has even changed the type of book that publishers want. "A fiction writer can't do that, but a memoirist can," he says.

"A Million Little Pieces," which was Oprah Winfrey's book club selection for October, 2005, has more than three million copies in print in North America. After the book's veracity was challenged earlier this month, it went back onto hardcover best-seller lists and continues among the top best-selling paperbacks in most retail outlets.

Mr. Frey said on the "Larry King Live" that he and his agent initially shopped "A Million Little Pieces" to other publishers as a novel and were turned down. In an interview, Ms. Talese said that she was never told that the book had been offered originally as fiction.

Richard Pine, a partner in the New York literary agency InkWell Management LLC, said that presenting the book as fiction to one publisher and nonfiction as another is "highly questionable ethics."

Mr. Frey declined to comment for this story. His literary agent, Kassie Evashevski at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, didn't return a request for comment.

Random House's Mr. Applebaum notes that a typical publishing company issues hundreds, if not thousands of nonfiction books each year, most of them running at least several hundred pages in length. Trying to verify the facts in each would be "a very daunting challenge regardless of the economics involved," he says. But he expects that the future reception for first-time memoirists could be different, especially "those with highly melodramatic, uncorroborated life narratives."

Another alternative to substantially fact-checking a book is to add a disclaimer stating that the incidents presented are true to the author's best recollection -- or that some passages are fictionalized. Last Friday, after her standing ovation, Ms. Talese had a tuna salad at her desk with Mr. Frey as they drafted an author's note that will accompany any further editions of "A Million Little Pieces." It has not yet been finalized.

Last week, the publisher issued a statement saying, "We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of 'A Million Little Pieces.'" In an interview, Ms. Talese said, "We will continue to print the book as long as there is public demand for it."

Meanwhile, the fate of Mr. Frey's second memoir, the best seller "My Friend Leonard," published by Pearson Plc's Riverhead Books, is still unclear. The publisher said it is reviewing the situation, as well as two additional books it has agreed to publish by Mr. Frey.

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com