What fact-checking means now

Virginia Heffernan writes an interesting piece in the New York Times that compares and contrasts the fact checking of so-called "legacy media" and today's online competitors. She demonstrates the distance we've come from using red and no. 2 pencils and printed reference sources to what happens today.

"Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that."