That’s a problem. If he really hasn’t apologized, neither he nor Ars have recognized there is a problem, which means it will happen again.
When journalists are working on a shared byline, they don't each do the same research in order to fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of trust required for collaborating like this and Edwards violated that trust.
You can say this is a failure by the editorial process for not including fact checking, but that is an organizational issue with Ars, it's not the fault of Orland for failing to duplicate the work that he believed his coauthor did.
He's on the byline and he's an editor.
> they don't each do the same research in order to fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of trust
If we're going to excuse this, what does the byline mean? He trusted the wrong person. It would be like if a source lied to him. Not the end of the world. But absolutely credibility destroying if instead of an apology you get a word salad.
> You can say this is a failure by the editorial process
Orland is also an editor. (Senior gaming editor [1].)
There is also a huge difference between trusting a coworker and falling for a lie of a source. Journalists deal with sources with a certain level of skepticism that just isn't productive or conducive to being a good coworker. Have you ever dealt with a coworker who didn't trust people to do their jobs? It's incredibly offputting.
I'll also point out that I said blame the "editorial process", that isn't the same as blaming an individual editor. This type of basic fact checking is either funded by the business or it isn't. This is very unlikely to be a failure of an individual rather than an absence of fact-checking at all and the decision for that is very unlikely to be made by the "senior gaming editor" (and it should be noted this wasn't even a gaming story).
There seems to be a disconnect between the way journalism generally works and your expectations for how it works. I believe Orland got duped by behaving the way most journalists would in a system that is less able to catch issues like this due to general industry cutbacks.
