Fact check is one of the most important skills in any journalist’s toolbox, especially as online journalism continues to grow and diversify. It is a process of verifying facts with experts and gathering additional evidence to ensure that information published by our publications is accurate and serves readers best.
When fact checking an article, the first step is to read through the reporter’s annotated draft. The fact checker keeps the research package close by and pays special attention to the reporter’s annotations. It’s important that the fact checker contacts everyone (including people, companies, and organizations) named in the story, even if they weren’t the original source of the information or didn’t originally answer the reporter’s questions.
The next step is to consider each isolated fact and the sourcing in the research package. Some facts are easy to confirm; others might require more digging. If a source is non-authoritative, the fact checker must find additional sources to confirm the information (this can be a tricky part of the job). The fact checker also examines the research and sourcing for any quotes that have been attributed to other sites or blogs, and checks to see whether those quotes are accurate or not.
If a documentary source is in a foreign language, the fact checker sends the interview recording and transcript to an interpreter to translate the answers into English. Then the interpreter sends the translated documents back to the fact checker, who records them in their file and in the research folder.
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