The Data Journalism That Wasn’t – The New York Times story about print v. digital publishing yesterday reminded me of this piece from the Future of Music Coalition, disputing the article, “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” which ostensibly relied on data provided by FMC. The article argues that “music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-­Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves.” Except that the Times, apparently, ended up running a story that the FMC told the fact checkers relied on inaccurate or unverifiable elements of their overall narrative, which, according to the FMC, overstates the case for the profitability of music for individual musicians in the current landscape:

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine reached out to Future of Music Coalition with regard to a forthcoming feature. We like to help out with this sort of thing, because we know that music business structures and practices can be quite complicated, and think it’s important that journalists get the facts and context as correct as possible, whatever narrative they’re advancing. Last week, fact-checkers from the magazine followed up with FMC staff. There was a good deal of back and forth as we were provided short paragraphs, and later, individual sentences, from the article and asked to verify whether they were “true.” (Unfortunately, we weren’t provided with much context.)

[…]