Guide to magazine fact checking published

If you want something done, you've gotta do it yourself, sometimes. So it is with Cynthia Brouse, the reigning doyenne of fact-checking in Canada, who has now published a dandy little textbook on the subject called After the Fact: A Guide to Fact Checking for Magazines and Other Media. The book is available online through this link. Price is $16.95 for a paperback, $13.95 for a download of the book in pdf format.

[It] explains why magazines use fact-checkers when other media don't; how to put a fact-checking system in place; and how to go about checking the facts in an article. Fact-checking is a key entry-level or freelance position in the magazine business, a way for aspiring writers or editors to learn how a magazine works and how professional writers put together a story, and to develop relationships with editors that can lead to assignments or jobs. And the more writers know about what happens to their articles when they are fact-checked, the more prepared they’ll be to provide what editors want — and to protect their copy. These skills can be adapted to any medium.

Brouse will be using the book as the required text in her fact-checking course at Ryerson, but it has usefulness way beyond that. One of the things that distinguishes magazines from other media is this arcane, but incredibly useful process which -- a colleague said just yesterday -- "saved our bacon time and time again".

The award winning writer (gold for feature writing at the National Magazine Awards) and editor is the former managing editor of Saturday Night magazine in Toronto and was chief of copy editing and research for Toronto Life, as well as working for Maclean's and Canadian Business.

For five years she was on the English faculty at George Brown College in Toronto, and since 1987 has taught part-time in Ryerson University's School of Journalism and in its Magazine Publishing Certificate Program in the G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education.

Fair disclosure: I freely gave Brouse a blurb for her book. After a sneak preview, I called it a "gem", and I still think it is.

[Regular readers of this blog will recall the back and forth comments some time ago in response to a couple of postings on fact checking. The links are here and here.]