Malcolm Gladwell discusses something he'll never do again

A tiny but useful mistake story by Malcolm Gladwell, from the disclosure page on his website - a fascinating document in its own right. Here he discusses one of the principles he uses to balance his roles as New Yorker writer and paid public speaker:

Any speaking I do should be just that—speaking. The possibility for trouble is much greater when a writer steps outside the role of giving a set speech and becomes a consultant or advisor, or in some ways develops a continuing financial arrangement with a specific company or organization. Once, I was asked to be a consultant to a marketing firm. I said yes—briefly—then immediately resigned when I realized the implications of that act. I will not do that again. Anything outside of simple speaking is inappropriate.

"I will not do that again" is a bright signal that this is a mistake story that had a significant impact on the teller.

"30th Anniversary of E-mail" mistake persists

Word went around the internet last week that 30 August 2012 was the 30th anniversary of e-mail, without doubt one of the most significant inventions of the past 50 years.

The anniversary was meaningless, of course. The occasion was the 30th anniversary of the copyrighting of a system called EMAIL (which did support electronic mail), developed for a small New Jersey college. The owner of the copyright is V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who was a teenager in 1982 when he developed this system.

David Pogue, the New York Times tech columnist, was one of the many who jumped on the bandwagon (via a tweet, of course, the easiest way to jump on a story without fully checking it out). Yet, when confronted with the error by readers, he wrote a lengthy apology of the whole EMAIL issue, including a detailed explanation from a reader, Thomas Heigh. A bit of Heigh's email to Pogue:

A colleague sent me a copy of your tweet, “Happy birthday to EMAIL! 30 years old today!” I’m afraid that you’ve inadvertently endorsed the propaganda campaign of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who has been mounting a vigorous but quixotic effort to convince the world that he invented email as a schoolboy between 1978 and 1982. He mounts his case at www.inventorofemail.com. However, his claims have been almost universally rejected by technology experts and historians, on the simple basis that you can’t invent something during (or after) 1978 that was already in widespread use by that time.

The roots of email stretch back more than 40 years, including to a DARPA RFC (specification) covering a "mail box protocol" in 1971. (The source for this is a powerful apology from Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton published in March, 2012, after he and a reporter had similarly reported Ayyadurai's copyright as the "invention" of e-mail.

It shows how a determined self-promoter can, through sheer effort and chutzpah, convince top-line journalists of something that is demonstrably not true; not once, but over and over again.

Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro finds his career-long theme via a mistake

This is from the New York Times profile of Robert Caro, written by Charles McGrath, published in advance of Caro's fourth volume in his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson." McGrath's article points out that many turning points in Caro's career came as a result of mistakes:

There was never a plan," Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. "There was just a series of mistakes."

In the following excerpt, McGrath explains how Caro first became interested in the subject of getting and wielding political power, a theme that he has carried through five massive books over more than 40 years of writing:

In order to marry, Caro needed a job. The Times offered him one as a copyboy for a salary that he now recalls as "something like $37.50 a week." The New Brunswick Daily Home News and Sunday Times offered him $52 a week to be a reporter, and Caro took it. Another mistake, except that it led to an early lesson in power politics. The paper's chief political writer was on leave to work for the Democratic Party in Middlesex County during an election. When he became ill, Caro took his place. He wrote speeches and did P.R. for one of the party bosses. On Election Day he rode around with this man to the polling places, and at one point they came upon the police loading some black people into a patrol wagon. "One of the cops explained that the black poll watchers had been giving them some trouble, but they had it under control," Caro recalled. "I still think about it. It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the - meekness isn't the right word - the acceptance of those people of what was happening. I just wanted to get out of that car, and as soon as he stopped, I did. He never called me again. He must have known how I felt."

The fascination and revulsion Caro found in that scene, in the privileges and unwritten rules of power, made a lifelong mark. Soon after that, Caro fixated on the behind-the-scenes opoerator Robert Moses, initiator of many 20th century New York public works projects (Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, Cross Bronx Expressway, etc., etc.). That led to Caro's first book, "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and, then to his 40-year study of another power broker, Lyndon Johnson.

The NYT's Jill Abramson publishes a mea culpa within a book review

In a brief section of her 2008 review of Bob Woodward's Bush-era books, Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson includes a stark and forthright admission of error. She owns her missteps related to the Times' buttressing the administration's position on weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.) as a pretext for the Iraq war:

In “Plan of Attack” Woodward acknowledges an error of his own: he admits he should have pushed The Washington Post to publish a front-page article about the flimsiness of the intelligence on W.M.D. I was Washington bureau chief for The Times while this was happening, and I failed to push hard enough for an almost identical, skeptical article, written by James Risen. This was a period when there were too many credulous accounts of the administration’s claims about Iraq’s W.M.D. (including some published in The Times and The Post).

[Hat tip Capital New York. This piece also includes more context on Abramson's role in the editing of the Times' Iraq War pieces.]

Ann Curry's rookie mistake

From Newsweek's "My Favorite Mistake" series. This story is from TV newscaster Ann Curry.

After more than 30 years in television news, my list of mistakes is pretty long, beginning with my first exclusive in Medford, Ore. I put myself through journalism school with the help of some small scholarships. I was working as a cocktail waitress, and thought, there’s got to be a better job than this. I became a general-assignment reporter at a local TV station, and I was the first woman to ever be a reporter for the station. I had a lot to prove. Before I got the job, the top producer pulled me aside and said, “You shouldn’t become a news reporter—women have no news judgment. And besides, you can’t carry the camera.”

This was small-town television, so I was both the camerawoman and reporter. It was a massive story, about thousands of dollars that were missing from the city budget. I had an exclusive interview with the city manager. As he was talking, he was sweating like the guy on Broadcast News. I knew the interview was good, but when I got back to the station, I discovered I forgot to load the film into the camera. Imagine what I felt like! I drove back to City Hall, and begged him to do the interview again. He looked at me, rolled his eyes, and gritted his teeth. He answered the same questions, but some of the drama of the interview was lost. I guess the lesson was not to let your exuberance make you lose focus.