Seattle-based freelance journalist Wudan Yan is a founder, producer and host of The Writers’ Co-op podcast. She’s a business coach, a content marketing writer and an advocate for fair and prompt pay for freelancers. She’s a knitter of beautiful sweaters, a rock climber and a long-distance hiker who takes on continent-spanning trails.
Next month, to add to that extensive bio, she will open the virtual doors of Factual, an agency that matches nonfiction storytellers across platforms with vetted fact-checkers to help ensure the accuracy of their work. The agency is an expansion of Yan’s business-savvy approach to freelance journalism and draws on her own experience as a fact-checker of magazine articles, books, podcasts and documentary films.
Storyboard spoke with Yan about the new venture and the nature of fact-checking, but also about how she juggles major projects and what she calls her journalism escape fantasy. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
First, what is Factual?
Factual is an agency that matches people producing nonfiction works — books, podcasts, documentaries, memoirs, and so forth — with a fact-checker who meets Factual’s standards. You can think of us as matchmaker or a dating app for fact-checking.
The intended client differs based on the industry. For instance, if a magazine wants to hire a stable of fact-checkers to check every single issue of their magazine, the magazine pays them.; the freelancers writing for the magazine don’t pay for the fact-checking. For books, the burden to pay for fact-checking shifts to the author. For podcasts it’s often the production company that pays for fact-checking. For documentary films, it may be the distributor.
In my business model, the client pays Factual, which takes a fee for its services, like a literary agency does, and Factual pays the freelance fact-checker a project fee. Prices set with the client help ensure I can pay my operations staff and the fact-checkers what they want to make to support their income goals. Fact-checkers get paid by the project, too, and are responsible for making sure they earn what they want, which is a minimum of $30 an hour.
What about people who work for newspapers? They generally don’t have their work vetted by fact-checkers. Do you have advice about what they can do to fact-check their own work?
First, I think we need to define fact-checking, because the way you used fact-checking in that question is not how I would define it. People refer to three separate things as fact-checking.
My definition is pre-publication fact-checking, which is when the nonfiction project has not yet been brought forth into the world. Somebody who has not been involved in the production, writing or editorial process comes in with fresh eyes to verify things, propose suggestions for accuracy and flag inaccuracy. That is what Factual will provide: pre-publication fact-checking.
Another definition is post-publication fact-checking. I like to call this the fact-debunking industry, like Snopes and PolitiFact. So if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated, this is combing back through what they said for accuracy.
The third is when a reporter says: No third party helped; I did the fact-checking myself. But you can’t fact-check your own work. In my view, fact-checking is similar to the peer review process in science: You submit a paper and then other people vet its methods. In that model, fact-checking only works if somebody else is doing it. If you are doing it yourself, you are double-checking your own work, and I cannot consider that fact-checking. A new set of eyes brings some disinfectant to the whole editorial process.
Might the solution be to have a colleague in the newsroom look it over?
At some newspapers, the copy editor helps with fact-checking. If you are filing a story for a newspaper, it can be instructive to provide fact-checking annotations. If the editor wants to change the text for readability, they can go to the source material and figure out an accurate way to do that.
You do a lot. I think every freelance journalist would like to know how you juggle it all, or at least I would.
Over the years I’ve learned that not all my dreams need to be realized at once. The way that I made room to launch an agency is similar to the way I plan out a reporting project that is due in six months: I set manageable goals for myself every month. Example: In quarters one and two of 2024, I realized I had 10 hours a month to figure out Factual. Once I determine that, I just have to hold myself accountable.
This is the through-hiking perspective as well: On long trails, eventually I’m hiking 20-plus miles a day, but that’s not where I start. Building that muscle and rhythm into my workflow helps me account and reprioritize whatever’s going on in my life and business every month, every quarter.
What advice do you have for journalists who would like to become fact-checkers?
I think reporters are uniquely suited to being good fact-checkers. What happens so often with freelancers is that they are scared to start doing something new, even though the skills are transferable. For freelance reporters looking to break into fact-checking, emphasize your skills at chasing down facts and hunting the best source. Bring that to clients that you’ve loved working with before that might use fact-checkers: Hey, I’m offering a new service. Do you need any help?
This is expanding your service offerings as a freelancer rather than breaking into a new service. We have a whole episode on The Writers’ Co-op about ways to frame the transfer of skills from one service area or industry to another. Brooke Borel also wrote a good reference book about fact-checking. But there is no better way to learn than to practice.
In addition to your business focus, you are a talented journalist. Will we be seeing more journalistic work from you soonThank you. I am a freelance journalist who cares a lot about the craft, but I see my first business, my editorial business, as laying the groundwork for learning how to be an entrepreneur. I’ve started two businesses and now am on my third. I know how much the journalism industry is struggling. What I’ve taken from these 10 years of freelancing is how to build a business. If we’re talking about escape fantasies from journalism, that’s probably where I’m headed if my priorities change.
It gives me a lot less fear about this media environment for myself, but we shouldn’t take this on individually; we should fix the system. Personally, I see that freelancing let me build up the skills for running a business, which I then scaled up. It can give you the confidence to run other types of businesses as well.
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Madeline Bodin is a freelance environmental and science journalist based in Vermont.
