In the 24-hour 360-degree news cycle that is the Web, fact checking seems to be a lost art, but I encountered this interview with an editor at a small Virginia paper that suggests otherwise:
From the American Press Institute site:
Fact checking a sensitive story: 6 good questions with News Leader editor William Ramsey.
I was particularly struck by these bits:
Q: Can you describe how the fact checking was conducted for this series? Did you use a checklist? A spreadsheet? A particular process?
A: We had a multi-pronged approach. We generated a list of every factual statement (not actual copy) from the main stories and sent it to state officials, who used investigators and PIOs to verify the information. This was critical since a portion of our reporting featured narratives rebuilt from disjointed case records. We also sampled a percentage of our hand-built database and determined an error rate, which was really low. We made those error fixes, and re-sampled another portion, which held up. For accuracy in [Borns’] writing, we extracted facts from her project’s main story and made a Google spreadsheet for the team, using it to log verification of each fact, the source, the person checking and a note when a change was made to the draft.
Q: In the fact checking of this series, were there any lessons learned that will be used at the News Leader in the future, or could be replicated at other news organizations?
A: I hope so. We tried two new ideas I liked: war room Fridays and a black hat review.
For the Friday sessions, we took over a conference room and brought in reporters not connected to the project. On one Friday, for example, our government reporter spent the day checking story drafts against state records.
For the “black hat” review, borrowed from the software development industry, we took turns playing a critic’s role, peppering ourselves in a hostile interview about process, sources and conclusions. It gave us actionable information to improve the content before it published.
There is so much yammer about computational journalism (much of it hype to my old-school ears), but this example of using both old-fashioned and computer approaches to fact check the work of journalism seems to me a lot more valid that trawling the data for “news” and then reporting it even if specious or trivial. I particularly like the image of “black hat” fact checkers. In cybersecurity, it seems you call (at least some of) these Pen Testers.
A Few Reasonable Words 