A bazillion years ago, when I was a journalism undergrad, I made the stupidest mistake of my career: I turned down a paid summer internship on the features desk of the St. Petersburg Times* (now the Tampa Bay Times) to take an unpaid internship at SHAPE magazine. I was young and ignorant of the paper’s reputation as the pinnacle of narrative journalism in the newspaper business, nurturing Pulitzer Prize-winning storytellers like Lane DeGregory, Thomas French, and Rick Bragg.
Instead, I spent the summer living rent-free with my aunt and working 40 hours a week at Weider Publications in Woodland Hills, Calif., where I rode an elevator with editors who pretended I was invisible. The only staffers who’d actually speak to me were on the copy desk — where I worked as a fact-checker — and two Muscle and Fitness associate editors who let me lift weights with them in the gym.
As an intern, I hoped to report and write a few small stories to beef up my skinny portfolio. But I was only allowed to fact-check articles written by freelancers. Every manuscript was printed out in double-space type and annotated by hand for the fact-checker.
With fact-checking, everything must be verified
Back in the analog days, here’s what that looked like: Every verifiable fact or quote was swiped with a highlighter and numbered. The numbers corresponded to sources listed on the fact-checking source list: a scientific study or other document (printed, with relevant facts highlighted) or a human source with a phone number. As I recall, reading scientific studies was above my pay grade. It was my job to call the sources and verify every quote and fact. The phone calls went something like this:
“Hi. I’m a fact-checker for SHAPE magazine, and I need to verify some facts. Let’s start with the spelling of your name, Bob Smith. Is that spelled B-O-B…S-M-I-T-H?”
As I read each letter aloud, I would strike it through on the manuscript with a pencil. The facts had to be read one by one, extracted from the context of a sentence. “Your hair is brown. You’re a registered dietitian. You live in Los Angeles…” As each sentence was verified, I’d strike it through.
Fact-checkers are unsung heroes
When I left SHAPE without a single published clip, I thought I’d wasted my summer. But I did learn some skills that would later be indispensable:
- Be kind to interns.**
- Custom-design your reporting workflow and organizational system for the benefit of your future self and fact-checker.
- As you write a first draft, annotate the text with fact-checking footnotes: Links, sources, and other breadcrumbs can be followed back to the source.
Meta may be ending its fact-checking program on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. But in the journalism world, fact-checking lives on. At newspapers, much of it falls on the reporter and copy desk. At commercial magazines, the copy desk often employs a squad of staff and freelance fact-checkers. They don’t get bylines, and their work is often invisible to the reader. They are great unsung heroes, now more than ever.
Most readers — and a shocking number of journalism students — don’t understand the rigor and process of fact-checking. At some publications, such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, the process has been known to bring professional writers to tears. But those same fact-checkers help us sleep at night. Especially the night before a story comes out in print.
When I published my first book, which contained some technical asides on the science of severe weather, I was mortified to learn that book publishers don’t employ fact-checkers. That falls on the author. Having grown accustomed to face-saving fact-checkers who caught a typo, transposed number, or misspelled name, I decided to hire one. Fact-checking rates often start at $50 an hour, so I sold a beloved mountain bike to be able to afford one. (There are also agencies, like Wudan Yan's Factual, that news organizations and journalists can hire.)
Below, I'm sharing my own guide to working with fact-checkers. It will help you better understand the process and keep your reporting organized for when the time comes to share it. For more insights on fact-checking, see this post by National Geographic fact-checker Brad Scriber.
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Kim Cross's guide to working with fact-checkers
How does fact-checking work?
During this process, fact-checkers call your sources to check quotes and verify facts you've reported, ask you for interview recordings and transcripts, and expect links or documents that verify facts, figures, and other details in your story.
When does fact-checking occur?
Fact-checking occurs in a small window of time (a week or two) after you've finished rounds of editing and reporting with your editor, and before the manuscript goes into copy editing and production. "Production" is the part of the cycle when stories are being laid out, text is being "copy fit" (trimmed to fit the layout), pages are being proofed by several layers of editors, including the Editor-in-Chief. This all happens on deadline and is the most stressful part of the month for your editor, so the easier you can make the fact-checker's job, the more likely the editor will be to assign you another story.
What will I need to share?
- A source list. This can be a spreadsheet or a Word document. It should include the name, phone number, and email of every human source you've interviewed, and all other sources cited. If an interview subject is hard to reach or prefers to be contacted in a certain way, note that too. (Before you do any of this, let every source know they will be contacted by a fact-checker. Be sure to prepare them for what to expect, technically and emotionally as well — for many of your sources, it might mean another process of re-reporting difficult or traumatic moments.)
- Interview recordings and transcripts. I use a digital recorder and upload the MP3 files to a service like Otter.ai for automated transcription. You can generate a URL to each interview and paste that link in your source list. (Be mindful of privacy and security settings for cloud-based services.) Pro tip: You can use the highlighter tool in Otter.ai to highlight quotes and key information that makes it into your story.
- Links and digital copies of all primary and secondary sources. These may include scanned book pages, websites, newspaper articles, scientific studies, photos, videos, and screenshots of texts or social media posts. It's anything that you used to find a quote, detail, or other fact in your story. If I write a scene in which a character is wearing a blue dress, I will need to submit a photo of the character in a blue dress.
- Calculations or sources for any facts and figures you calculated yourself. For example, I sometimes use Google Earth to measure the distance between two scenes "as the crow flies" and/or travelled by car, on roads. I submit a screenshot of Google Earth showing the number. If I calculate the average number of miles someone drove over a period of time, I write my math calculation in the footnote.
This sounds intimidating. What can I do while I'm reporting to make fact-checking easier and less stressful?
That's a great question, and I'm so glad you're asking it now. If you are not prepared for fact-checking, it can be stressful and even traumatic. But this should provide a strong incentive to design your "system" around fact-checking needs that will arise at the end of the process, sometimes months after you reported a story, when your head is deep into the next story and you can't remember where you found a given fact or where you put the source. Few things frustrate me more than wasting time re-finding a source.
Here are a few pro tips from my own 'system'
- Use a secure, cloud-based storage platform (Dropbox, Microsoft One, iCloud, etc.) for all your reporting files. These systems are backed up remotely, so in the event you lose/damage your laptop or delete a file, you can access that file through the web. I personally use Dropbox. (Another reminder to be mindful of privacy and security settings for your folders and data.)
- Create a folder for each story or project. I name certain files starting with 000, 00A, 00B (etc.) so my most urgent projects appear at the top of the (alphabetically sorted) list.
- Inside that story folder, create a "fact-checking" folder. Store digital copies of all your sources here, in one place. If you find a page in a book, use a scanner app on your phone to create a PDF, and upload it to this folder. (I use an app called Scanner Pro, which allows me to upload directly from my phone to a specific Dropbox folder. You may find newer, better ones.)
- Name your files (especially interviews and dated documents) with a date-based format: YYYY-MM-DD-Keyword. This will automatically sort your files into chronological order, which comes in handy later when you're looking for something.
- As you're writing the story, generate a URL for each source and paste it into a footnote in your draft. Dropbox (or any other cloud-based service) will generate a unique URL for that file. You can paste this link into the footnotes as you're writing your story. A fact-checker (or you, or your editor) can click on the URL and — voilà! — up pops the primary source. Here's an example from a real story. Pro tip: If you really want to impress your fact-checker, you've already highlighted the part of the document you've referenced. Their eye will go right to it, so they don't have to read the whole document. Click here to see an example.
- Highlight and link your interview transcripts as well. Here's an example. Note: The free (or less-expensive) version of Otter.ai now limits the number of files you can import in a given month. To avoid this limit, you can record interviews directly in Otter.ai (the web-based platform on your computer or the phone app). I like to record on my audio recorder as a backup, in case my phone dies or someone calls me and the app stalls.
- Keep a list of all your sources in one place (a spreadsheet or document). Ideally, include the links here, too. This creates an index that you can use to see an "at a glance" inventory of what you have. (Often, in a big story you'll gather so many sources you forget what you have, and then your effort is wasted.)
- Ask yourself this question: If someone questions a fact in my story a year from now, will I be able to find it quickly? Some publications require you to keep sources for one year after publication. If anyone questions something in the story, your editor will come to you and expect you to pull up the source. So, design your system based on how your brain works.
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Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and feature writing instructor for Harvard Extension School's graduate journalism program and the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.
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* A decade later, after four years of working for magazines, I crawled back to the St. Pete times, confessed my stupid mistake, and begged for another chance. I spent the summer as their 27-year-old married intern and met a lifelong mentor, who is now the Great Reads deputy editor at The New York Times.
** A future intern, ignored by everyone else, got me my first speaking gig at a conference, where I met my first literary agent, who got me a book deal that led to me quitting my staff-editor job to write books and freelance.
