I’ve been reading Cecil’s columns and the Staff Reports for years, and I’m curious. I’ve noted the staff reports tend to be very well researched and include nice bibliographies at the end of each report, while Cecil apparently isn’t held to the same standard. He might be doing the same effort in researching his columns, but we’re very rarely told about it. He only occasionally mentions this or that reference, and he doesn’t provide a bibliography. What’s up with that?
If this topic has been discussed before, I’d be appreciative if someone could provide links to the earlier threads. I’m apparently not allowed to search with a guest account.
*** Ponder
Cecil’s columns are designed for placement in the Chicago Reader and whatever other papers to which they are syndicated. This leaves limited room for source citations in the first place. And frankly, his readers want his sarcastic comments rather than a bibliography.
Cecil has 800 words, including the question, to write the column. Since it’s difficult enough constraining his wisdom to a mere 700-750 words, there just isn’t any room for footnotes or citations.
However, since I’ve been helping Cecil research several topics over the last few years, I can tell you some general facts. Cecil does employ a large number of resources, including online references, offline references, interviews via phone or e-mail, and referring to his own extensive library (which I’ve not seen but have been told is quite large). Despite the snide insinuations of some dumbasses and general timbertools, he does not crib articles from Wikipedia or engage in mass Google searches to write columns. In fact, Cecil has an aversion to relying upon Wikipedia for anything; the reasons are unknown to me but may be (speculating) based on the fact that some Wikipedia articles are poorly researched and others seem to change their content almost daily, often for no really driving reason.
In addition he has people like me who make calls and break balls, do grunt work of looking up references and driving to the library to check through books and journals, and even find folks who have first-hand knowledge about a topic. On rare occasions, someone on the SDSAB is that person with the knowledge.
Cecil uses somewhere between a dozen or more to as many as 50 different sources for a typical column, depending upon the complexity and scope of the topic. In some drafts which he has folks fact-check he puts a reference tag or footnote for every single sentence - sometimes multiple ones in each sentence. When Cecil researches a topic for the Teeming Millions, he really does put in a lot of work. I don’t know exactly how many hours per week he spends on each column, but my guess is that it is pretty damn significant.
Because he is very busy and does not tend to respond to mails asking for references, you’re better off asking in here for specific references. Most likely someone on the SDSAB who fact-checked or helped with an article can answer you.
Thanks for the responses. It makes sense that there would be a severe limit on what can be presented in a dead-tree newspaper column. It’s too bad this lack of space has lead to rumors that he does slipshod research. I’ve done work on wikipedia (User:Ponder). I understand completely why Cecil should be reluctant to rely upon it as a source.
I guess I’ve gotten a bit spoiled by the reports from the SDSAB, and other sites like Snopes.com who are quite proud of the bibliographies they present along with their articles. Perhaps SDSAB members could toot their own horns, and whenever a Cecil article is posted to the main site that you helped do the research on, you could start a thread here and post the missing bibliography.
*** Ponder