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Editor’s Note | WaPo

We received this rather stunning admission in an Editor’s Note | WaPo today in our hometown newspaper.

We thought sharing this might shed a little more light on why we do what we do here at Thrasher's Wheat -- where we've been separating the wheat from the chaff since 1996. We're spare everyone another "it's all an illusion, you're being bullshitted with fake news and propaganda."

Editor’s Note
By Washington Post Staff July 26

In February 2018, The Washington Post launched new lists of best-selling books.

In an attempt to combine online and in-store sales, some of the new lists incorporated data from both NPD BookScan and Amazon. For the first three months, all the lists were published correctly. But in late May 2018, the software that merges the two data sets began to experience substantial, intermittent errors, rendering the lists inaccurate. Two causes have been identified. One was related to how the software ingested and combined data from the two sources. The other started in late December 2018, when a change in one data source led the software to begin inadvertently removing the top bestseller, causing the books to be listed in the wrong order and ignoring some sales from top-selling titles. These errors were caught in June 2019. All errors have been corrected and the lists have been republished online and labeled with corrections.

The Post is now hand-checking every list before publication to ensure accuracy.Thank goodness you guys are now checking for accuracy before publishing. It's only been 18+ months of readers telling WaPo something was very wrong with their "BestSellers Listing" before their robot editors could be re-programmed.

Unlike WaPo, here at TW, we've always hand-checked every article before publication to ensure accuracy. But more importantly, folks should realize that most major publications heavily rely on auto-generated content.

So, in the meantime, we'll continue to get our news via Times-Contrarian | NYA.

Otherwise, we'll just continue to blog until the power goes out, Turn Off the News (& Build a Garden).

More on "The Illusion", "Winterlong", "Tired Eyes Wide Shut" and "The Quantum Big Shift".

TW: "Hand-checking every article before publication to ensure accuracy since 1996."
WaPo: "Now hand-checking every list before publication to ensure accuracy since July 26, 2019."

namaste