The fear of the fact checker

Common in US magazines, less common in the UK, either way the fact checker is a hardy breed, sparing many a writer from blushes and/or lawsuits. So, in this New Yorker reminiscence, feel mortified at the following:

The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. [The fact checker] remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was 'the late' reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker , in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.

There, grace, God, etc.