Consider the now-infamous error in Newsweek's recent special issue on "Your Child": a recommendation that infants as young as five months old be allowed to feed themselves zwiebacks and raw carrot chunks. As most parents know, babies that young can choke on hard foods. When a pediatrician brought the mistake to Newsweek's attention, the magazine acted immediately. Recalling several hundred thousand copies from newsstands, hospitals, and doctors' offices, Newsweek reprinted and redistributed the issue, mistake corrected.
 It happens sometimes: the fact-checker had made a mistake. Such costly, embarrassing (and in this case, potentially dangerous - to babies, at that) errors are the kind of thing researchers and editors have nightmares about. And because Newsweek, like many other publications, has scaled back its fact-checking process over the past year, many - rightly or wrongly - have viewed the error as a dramatic symbol of magazines' increasing disregard for accuracy.

 Last fall, Newsweek offered its entire fact-checking staff the choice between a buyout and a job change, and it now has no full-time fact-checkers. Some checking is done by researcher/reporters (as it was in the zwieback incident), all of whom have additional responsibilities.

 Under Newsweek's old system, virtually the entire magazine was checked, but now, according to assistant managing editor Ann McDaniel, a large portion of the book is "author-checked." This means that writers are expected to get it right the first time around.

 Time also has been providing less in-house checking since last fall and expecting more writers to check their own work. Marta Dorion, Time's chief of reporters, thinks that the changing system may be turning out better journalists - just as daily newspapers, with deadlines too tight for fact-checking beyond the editing process, may breed more careful writers. Dorion admits that "there have been some bad errors that wouldn't have happened under the old-fashioned system." In a recent feature on the Green Bay Packers, for instance, Dorion notes, "we got their record wrong. That's pretty tacky."

 At Fortune, changes have been even more drastic. The biweekly business magazine virtually quit fact-checking cold turkey in January - though the editors do make exceptions for hastily reported stories or new writers. Executive editor Rob Norton explains, "Eighty percent of the fact-checking we did was redundant."
 Publications from Vogue to The Village Voice are relaxing standards, relying more on "author checks," or leaving large amounts of copy unchecked.

 Not all editors embrace this trend. Since 1992, when Tina Brown took over, the number of New Yorker fact-checkers has doubled. The department is famously thorough (known, perhaps apocryphally, for calling the Empire State Building to make sure it was still standing), and now must apply its still-stringent standards on a tighter schedule to allow for Brown's penchant for time-sensitive pieces.

 Ellen Levine, editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping - which is actually expanding its fact-checking department - says she is "shocked" that other magazines are getting rid of fact-checkers: "Reporters often overlook their own mistakes." And she points out that magazines have a different kind of responsibility than newspapers: "We have more time to be right."

 Time's Dorion says the changes are "entirely budgetary. These systems cost money." And, she notes, editors rarely seek to cut their own jobs. But Ann McDaniel claims that Newsweek's "restructuring" isn't financially motivated, noting the changes have been accompanied by an expensive upgrading of the magazine's library - better computer databases, more information specialists. At Newsweek, company lawyers now review copy more carefully than ever for potentially libelous material. McDaniel points out that moving fact-checkers into reporting slots has been to everyone's advantage: "The people who used to be fact-checking are happier in their new jobs, and now we have more reporters." Still, she admits that "there is no doubt about the value of fact-checking. In an ideal world we'd have more people doing it." And the zwieback incident? "One of those human errors."

 Fortune's Norton, too, denies that money was a consideration in its restructuring. "It was not a cost-cutting measure. The size of our staff remained the same." Norton doubts that most fact-checking is worthwhile. "Some of our worst errors have been in pieces that were fact-checked. Interestingly, when you know your piece isn't being checked, you take more care."

 But Katherine Wessling, Good Housekeeping's research editor, who has been fact-checking for eight years, calls phasing out checkers "a big risk. Even the best journalists make mistakes. If you factor in the problem that a lot of people just don't have basic reporting skills, it's a disaster. I don't think I have ever checked an article that didn't have at least one mistake."

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