In a rare move for a magazine as well-gate-kept as the New Yorker, Emily Gordon's blog emdashes has launched "Ask The Librarians," a monthly column by Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, head librarians at the New Yorker. And they get to the question everyone wants the answer to: Are New Yorker cartoons fact-checked?

Q. Are cartoons fact-checked? What's the sort of thing that checkers ask to be changed in a drawing or caption?

Erin writes: Every cartoon is fact-checked for accuracy and also checked against the library's archive to make sure that a similar cartoon has not run previously in the magazine. The New Yorker fact-checking department verifies both visual and text accuracy of a particular cartoon: If a drawing of the White House has the wrong number of columns on it or if a man's coat is buttoned on the wrong side, then the fact-checking department informs the cartoon department of the discrepency. The cartoon department will then either make the change or not depending on whether the discrepancy is intentional or not. In addition, if a cartoon caption gets a proper name wrong or, say, locates the Notre Dame in Bangkok, the fact-checking department will point out these inaccuracies. The cartoonists have learned that even a detail as small as the number on a taxicab will be checked to make sure it does not represent an actual cab number.

As Gordon tells us: "It's unprecedented for the magazine to do something like this."

Ask The Librarians [emdashes]