Fact-checking, some other views

Back in June, the blog carried an item about fact-checking. Recently, it made the rounds of a newsgroup of freelancers in Toronto and at least one of them posted a comment (three months late, as he said) that's worth reading because it argues against fact-checking. Click here or on the head above to read the item and the belated comment.

In addition, another correspondent of the newsgroup, a doyenne of fact-checking who has trained many of today's fact checkers, sent a response directly to me with a number of other people's comments on the topic. (Since I don't have permission to name them, these responses are presented anonymously):

Not surprisingly, I'm pleased to hear these comments in support of fact-checking, since I spend a lot of time teaching people how to do it and have published an article that argues for its existence.

As to the question of whether to hyphenate fact-checking, I usually do. But I also never spell copy editing the same way twice when I'm not being paid to get it right -- copyediting, copy-editing, copy editing; dictionaries differ. The shoemaker's kids go barefoot, the doctor's kids die young and the copy editor is inconsistent. Don't tell [my boss].) The Canadian Oxford Dictionary doesn't list fact-checking, but it does hyphenate fact-finding,which would seem to be a grammatically parallel form.

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I, too, appreciate the work checkers do on my stories. (A special nod to the great ones I've so often dealt with over the years -- Veronica Cusak, Dawn Promislow, Geri Savits-Fine, Charles Rowland, Cynthia Brouse.) I'm mainly a writer, & I know that especially with longer features writers understandably end up seeing the forest more clearly than individual trees. After you've lived with a story for weeks or months, even careful re-reading may not spot an error that a fresh set of eyes might.(Sometimes the handling editor, although that person is preoccupied with structure & bigger picture issues; sometimes the copy editor, but copy editors aren't scrutinizing every fact.) Every writer knows that tiny pieces inevitably fall through the cracks. The fact checker is the invaluable safety net catching as many of these stray pieces as possible. It's a great tradition in the magazine business & it's depressing to observe it gradually eroding.

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Just thought I'd throw in my two cents here, as someone who supplements his freelance income with regular checking jobs.

I'm not a huge checking partisan or anything - though I am glad to have an
hourly wage supplement to my buck a word ( a buck on the good days, that is. But here's the thing: in three years of fact-checking features, I have
*never* run across a feature that didn't have several mistakes in it. They're generally minor mistakes - money amounts that mix US with Canadian dollar figures, misspelled names of minor characters, etc. - but they're real mistakes nonetheless.

The majority of features I see, including those written by top people, have roughly TEN TO FIFTEEN of these types of comparatively minor errors in them. The absolute cleanest feature might have three to five.

Now, you could argue that these types of errors are things that the writers, had they been working in a checking-free zone, wouldn't have let through. But I don't think that's generally true. I think that most of these mistakes are just a product of the writing process, of the tricky nature of capturing reality in words. There's no way a single mind can account for every single little factual detail in a 5,000 word piece - especially at a buck a word or less.

To me, this justifies checking for mags, hands down (I shudder to think of
the howlers that make it into books and papers on a regular basis, given their lack of checking). And frankly, I find the attitude of DB's friend surprising. I know I'm personally thrilled by the fact that my mag work getschecked - it's not insulting, it's a kind of insurance policy for my research, helping me to breathe easier when the piece comes out.

Let me repeat: I have never in my career as a checker met an error-free
feature.
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To add my two cents, I've been lucky to secure a part-time internship that
allows me to do a lot of the work from home, including fact-checking some of the larger stories. Having done graduate research before, I'd thought that fact-checking would be a breeze, but this recent exercise has opened my eyes to just how skilled good fact-checkers are. Beyond simply knowing where to go to look up facts, I've found that it also requires a huge amount of tact,patience and (sometimes) humour, as well as skillful sleuthing.

I've just begun checking one of our features and have already found about half of Nick's quota of errors. I've also noticed that there is a lot of variance between authors -- some submit 'clean' copy that is a joy to check; others submit copy that's a little more difficult to decipher and definitely more of a challenge (though I'm not saying I don't like a challenge!).

Thinking about it now, I probably should have taking the fact checking course at Ryerson if I'd known how difficult this would be. In fact, I may end up taking it in any case!