From THE SLANT: <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>'s Andrew Goldman on Fact-checking

Andrew Goldman, the "Talk" columnist at The New York Times Magazine, may be one of the shittiest fact-checkers in history, or at least, he seems to think so. When he came to New York City in 1996, he snagged a plumb checking gig at New York magazine that lasted all of one week. "I was a disaster. I was just given a highlighter, but I had no idea what to do with it, so I highlighted everything. I was like fact-checking the word 'is'! It was impossible."

After pissing off editors with his artless digging -- including Ariel Kaminer, whose ethics column, until her recent departure, sat only pages away from Goldman's own in the Times magazine -- he wasn't called back. Since that fumbling first start he went on to land sweet staff writing spots at Boston Magazine, The New York Observer, Radar and Tina Brown's short-lived, but celebrated Talk.

In 2002, he ditched office-life to become a full-time freelancer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Elle, The Daily Beast, Wired, and many others. Now the well-established provocateur speaks candidly with The Slant about raising the ire of Richard Gere, Gloria Allred and Larry Summers. He also confesses a reverence for "pain in the ass fact-checkers" and the vital function they serve in maintaining journalism's integrity.

Read the Q&A at The Slant: There's Always More to the Story