The common problem with fact-checking is a misplaced reverence for “expertise” as a substitute for hard-nosed reporting and independent evaluation. So here are a few friendly suggestions for better fact-checking: Reporters do not represent the establishment, they should be suspicious of it; politicians who seem reasonable may not be; politicians who depart from the Washington consensus may be saying something important. If you think you can even get to the truth of a complex, contentious issue with a couple of phone calls, you are kidding yourself and your readers. And don’t invent a “truth” where the truth is genuinely in dispute.

— via “How to Fix Fact-Checking”, a post on Forbes by John McQuaid. It comes in response to a recent piece by Mark Hemingway in the Weekly Standard, “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’”.

An excerpt from the Standard piece, which had the subhead “The liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse”:

The media establishment has largely rallied round the self-satisfied consensus that fact checking is a noble pursuit. Nonetheless there are signs of an impending crack-up. In their rush to hop on the fact-checking bandwagon, the media appear to have given little thought to what their new obsession says about how well or poorly they perform their jobs.

It’s impossible for the media to fact check without rendering judgment on their own failures. Seeing the words “fact check” in a headline plants the idea in the reader’s mind that it’s something out of the ordinary for journalists to check facts. Shouldn’t that be an everyday part of their jobs that goes without saying? And if they aren’t normally checking facts, what exactly is it that they’re doing?

As such, fact checking frequently involves one news organization publicly accusing competing organizations of malpractice. Instead of newsroom watercooler kvetching and burying subtle digs in the eleventh paragraph, friendly fire is breaking out into the open.

From Dan Froomkin’s piece at Nieman:

Experts in journalistic ethics are encouraging reporters to take a more critical posture going forward.

“I think professional journalists have an absolute obligation to make lies transparent,” said Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute.

The first step is “to do the reporting so that you can with authority point out that this is an act of deception,” McBride said. With the Romney ad, that was easy; the accompanying press release provided Obama’s full quote.

Step two, McBride said, is to assign blame.

“Professional journalists need to follow up and figure out who in the campaign is responsible for this,” McBride said — “and keep at it.”

“We have to call that sort of thing out,” Geneva Overholser, director of USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism and a former Washington Post ombudsman, wrote in an e-mail. “Journalists did that, last week, but it seems to me it needs to have been even stronger. This was such a blatant act of deception. Treating it just like any other fact-checked ad, so many of which contain something mildly misleading, is itself misleading.”

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The second piece is a post by Brendan Nyhan at Columbia Journalism Review. (Disclosure: I’m a columnist for CJR.) Nyhan, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College, is doing some of the most interesting academic research into misinformation, and he’s now writing regularly for CJR. He looked at how some publications dealt with the Romney ad. Then he offered some advice on the best way to combat the misinformation:

… A better approach would be for reporters to characterize the accuracy of ads in their own voice and to invoke non-partisan experts like PolitiFact. In some cases, it may even be possible to find credible sources on the side of the candidate airing the misleading ad who are willing to state the truth. For instance, WMUR’s Sexton briefly paraphrases a GOP strategist conceding that Romney’s ad is misleading: “Republican political strategist Mike Dennehy says it definitely appears as though Obama’s words are taken out of context.” This approach might be especially persuasive to Republicans who are inclined to trust Romney and distrust the mainstream press.

Still, it’s important to be realistic about the effectiveness of this sort of fact-checking. My co-author Jason Reifler and I have shown in our research (PDF) that fact-checking frequently fails to reduce misperceptions among the ideological group that is most likely to hold the misperception and in some cases makes the problem worse (what we call a “backfire effect”). In this case, reporters should not expect to convince skeptical readers that ads they support are false.

Nonetheless, aggressive fact-checking can provide reputational incentives (PDF) for elites to make more careful claims.

Earlier this year I wrote a CJR column about the backfire effect, and how it presents a challenge for journalists:

We present facts and evidence, and it often does nothing to change people’s minds. In fact, it can make people dig in even more. Humans also engage in motivated reasoning, a tendency to let emotions “set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about”.

These two important cognitive effects can have a significant impact on society and debates in the public sphere. They also end up negating some of the debunking and reporting work done by the press.

*Correction December 2, 2011: The original headline on this piece misspelled debunking as “debunkng”. The first sentence also used the Canadian spelling of “across”. I use US spelling on this site, so I corrected that as well. I regret the errors, and thank rogerogreen for spotting both!

What’s enjoyable, and effective, is that the author uses a Prezi presentation to make his points. It’s a nice piece of fact checking. Have a look:

Here’s the editor’s note that was added to the offending piece:

This article in the April 17 Travel section included material that was taken without attribution from a documentary film. The article explored the Warhol museum in Medzilaborce and the reaction of Warhol’s relatives in nearby Mikova to the late artist’s notoriety. The writer, a freelance contributor to The Post, described a scene of men in rabbit-fur caps fixing a car exhaust and giving directions to the relatives’ home and mentioned passing a Soviet tank. Those scenes appeared in “Absolut Warhola,” a 2001 film by Stanislaw Mucha. The writer also used without attribution quotes from the documentary of conversations with Warhol’s cousin Michal Warhola and Warhol’s elderly aunt. In addition, while the article appeared to be based on a single trip, in fact it was based on several journeys, including one 10 years ago. The Post apologizes to filmmaker Stanislaw Mucha and to its readers for these lapses.

And here’s an excerpt from Pexton’s column:

… some of the quotes and scenes in the story were lifted, without attribution, from a documentary film about a journey to the museum made by Stanislaw Mucha in 2001. You can watch the film, “Absolut Warhola,” here on YouTube. A sharp-eyed Post reader remembered the documentary and informed the Travel section.

Travel editor Joe Yonan and deputy editor Zofia Smardz then contacted Rigney, asked him more questions and did more fact-checking on his story. Turns out Rigney, who has also written for the Christian Science Monitor, had made several trips, some dating back 10 years, to the Warhol museum, and the story was based on all of those, not just a recent trip.

When confronted by The Post, Rigney acknowledged that he “nicked’ some of the scenes and quotes from the documentary. Yonan and Smardz’s further fact-checking did determine that Rigney had been to the museum again recently and did in fact talk to the museum director.

They also fact-checked, as best as they could, two other stories Rigney had done for Travel, one about Berlin’s underground World War II bunkers and a second about Montenegro’s remote seaside towns. The bunker one checked out, but Rigney’s first-person account of his walking tours of Montenegran towns was almost impossible to verify, except that the towns described do exist, and seem to fit his descriptions.

There’s also a section that deals with fact checking, or the lack thereof at the Post and other newspapers:

But as for preventing any further instances of this kind of thing, here is the reality. The Post does not have an army of fact-checkers, as Kevin Sullivan, Post Sunday editor, explained. The paper can’t send staffers to Eastern Europe to fact-check every travel story. The Post is vulnerable to a one-shot deception by an unscrupulous freelancer.

Fact checking does not require you to send checkers around the world. Sure, that would be ideal, but it’s not what the New Yorker does to check articles. Sames goes for the other publications that employ staff or freelance checkers. It’s not clear if Sullivan made the comment about flying checkers to Eastern Europe, or if it was Pexton’s addition. Either way, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the basics of fact checking.

“We can be ever-vigilant and spot-check what we can, but I’m afraid that if a writer is intent on plagiarizing or otherwise violating basic journalistic practices, given our resources it will indeed be difficult to always catch it,” added Joe Yonan, Travel editor.

Yonan is correct: the lack of controls at the Post and other newspapers makes it highly unlikely that a dedicated plagiarist would be caught prior to publication. As I previously detailed here and here, papers simply aren’t checking for plagiarism. As noted above, they also aren’t fact checking in any systematic way.

So, yes, this will just keep happening.

I never thought I’d hear a grown man say he was “comfortable that ‘pants on fire’ was the right call.” But that’s what PolitiFact editor and St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief Bill Adair told me today.

We were discussing a controversial ruling his site issued on a political ad put out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The ad, which aims to scare seniors by declaring that Republicans have just voted to end Medicare, was given the lowest possible rating on PolitiFact’s “Truth-o-meter,” which defines statements, documents, ads, and other such declarations as True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, or, for the most egregiously misleading cases, like the DCCC ad, “Pants on Fire.”

The decision proved contentious—a number of readers wrote to PolitiFact to complain that the site “blew it on this one” or that PolitiFact had “jumped the shark.” Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo took issue with the ruling, too, writing a report titled “PolitiFact Insist Republicans Don’t Want to End Medicare.” But when I spoke to Adair Thursday afternoon, he was sticking with the decision. Liar, liar—you know the rest.

Both sides have a point—PolitiFact’s being the sharper, in my view—and we will get to that. But more interesting than the details of this mini controversy about a standard-issue political ad are the questions it raises about the PolitiFact method and the use of its Truth-o-meter. The truth, or at least the truthiness, of some matters, seems to lie in degrees that Adair’s innovative six-level gauge may not quite capture …

–via Testing the Truth-o-Meter, an interesting piece from Columbia Journalism Review (where I’m a columnist). Some spirited discussion in the comments as well.

Lawrence Wright’s cover story in the current edition of The New Yorker reports on the Church of Scientology …

– via Fact-Checking The Church Of Scientology: Journalist Lawrence Wright, a story on NPR.org.

'FactZone' Viewer Has Sad, Pathetic Life

Thanks, Daniel!

*Correction January 30: The headline of this post originally and incorrectly used the word "views" instead of viewers. Thanks, Steve!

The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community: One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials." … But how would we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario? Or is this recommendation wrong to begin with?

I’m going to focus on the recommendation to integrate digital and media literacy.

As has been the case for the past few years, early in the fall of 2010 I gave a presentation about accuracy and corrections (and new journalism startups) to first year journalism students at Concordia University. I finished my spiel and invited questions and comments. One young woman sitting near the front of the room put up her hand. Her question went something like this: “With so many different kinds of news websites and so many people publishing on blogs and other places, don’t you think it’s just too much?”

It seemed like a strange question. In fact, I remember having a negative reaction, and thinking that someone who wanted to curtail expression and experimentation probably shouldn’t be in journalism school right now.

I politely disagreed with her, as is my Canadian nature, saying something to the effect that what we need — now more than ever — is experimentation and lots of people trying new things. This will help evolve the news and information ecosystem.

I still agree with my answer, but her point is relevant, albeit in a different context. Yes, we live in a world of information abundance: sources, platforms, mediums, news, data. Often, this results in conflicting reports and misinformation. It makes it difficult for people to determine which sources and information are the most reliable — and which ones need to be tuned out.

As Clay Shirky said in a speech at Web 2.0 Expo (“It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure”), it’s only too much information if you don’t have the skills and tools to filter it. That filter is more essential today than ever before. Over the past year, I’ve come to believe it represents one of the essential skills for current and future generations of engaged, informed citizens — and for building communities where meaningful debate and engagement can emerge.

But how can we acquire and spread those skills? How do you turn filter failure into filter function? Universities have an important role to play in answering these questions. That’s is why the Knight Commission’s recommendation regarding digital and media literacy is spot on.

Battling Bullshit

One challenge is that “digital and media literacy” is a very broad area. Allow me to focus one small but essential sliver of the new, urgent literacy: bullshit detection.

Bullshit, you see, is everywhere. It is being produced, perfected, pontificated and pushed out at astounding rates by all manner of people and organizations. It spreads and multiplies. It morphs and mutates. People spew it, broadcast it, print it, tweet it, like it, blog it.

The bad news is there is too much bullshit. The good news — cue the theme to The Six Million Dollar Man — is we have the technology to defeat it. The strange news is that very same technology is also helping spread bullshit. Let me put it this way:

The Internet is the single greatest disseminator of bullshit ever created.

The Internet is also the single greatest destroyer of bullshit.

In between is a confusing world that is far less binary than the above construction. As that Concordia student put it, it's a world that sometimes seems characterized by "too much."

Which means all of us need to develop what Ernest Hemingway called a “a built-in bullshit detector.“ Universities need to teach the new literacy, to give people the tools to sniff out bullshit and practice the art of verification.

Educators such as Howard Rheingold are working to bring bullshit detection into the classroom. (He calls it "crap detection"; I'm a potty mouth.) Journalists have long sought to perfect the art of bullshit detection, with mixed results. But the problem is too widespread, too much a part of the distributed, user-centered world of communications we live, to be left to journalists alone. This is a skill, a need for everyone. (Want to get started? In a recent column for Columbia Journalism review, I outlined a range of advice to help journalists avoid becoming unwitting purveyors of bullshit. It's useful for anyone.)

This quote from an interview I did with Rheingold articulates the challenge:

“With the Internet we have so many people who are not traditional journalists breaking so many stories, so we have to face the fact that it’s no longer just people in the newsroom who are providing the first look at the news. And we need to improve their skills.”

“Are we going to have a world filled with people who pass along urban legends and hoaxes?” Rheingold said, “or are people going to educate themselves about these tools [for crap detection] so we will have collective intelligence instead of misinformation, spam, urban legends, and hoaxes?”

Those are the questions, the stakes. Universities — indeed all educational institutions — should build bullshit detection into the basic curriculum. For everyone. Our institutions of higher learning should make it a priority to create generations of discerning information consumers — the kind of people who can look at the chaos of our information ecosystem and easily find their way. Who don’t worry about the problem of too much.

Two Suggestions

I propose two measures to help move us in the right direction:

1. Make digital and media literacy a core course for all university students. Just as many schools have a required written composition course, or another class that’s taken by all students, there should be one focused on the new literacy and bullshit detection and verification. (Call it Bullshit Detection and no one with ditch!) These skills are just as important as reading and writing. In fact, they are core components of reading and writing. Two texts I would recommend for the course are Mediactive by Dan Gillmor and Blur by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. (Read my Q&A with Rosenstiel.) Both are excellent works that provide a useful, insightful guide to becoming an active, engaged and discerning media consumer and creator. Let me also add: There’s no reason why we should wait until university to begin teaching the new literacies.
2. Make fact checking a universal component of journalism education. There is a program at the Tilburg School of Journalism in the Netherlands that requires every fourth year journalism student to spend three weeks in an intensive fact checking program. Each student becomes a fact checker, responsible for examining reports form local and national media. They check the work of professionals and are given a hands on experience that shows them how journalist can go wrong, and how to walk back the cat on sources and information. How to detect bullshit. So much of what we teach in journalism school focuses on content creation and newsgathering. We often ignore the need to ensure that journalists — indeed everyone — is a skilled critical reader. This is the starting point of good bullshit detection. Felix Salmon expressed this in a recent blog post:

The biggest shortage in journalism right now isn’t good writers, or even enlightened proprietors willing to fund investigations. It’s critical readers – journalists who can see when they’re being snowed, who can read between the lines, who can pick up information from across the blogosphere and the twittersphere and be able to judge it on its own merits rather than simply trusting the publisher.

Imagine communities where people focus on the real, rather than the right-sounding; on facts rather than fabrication. Where neighbors and volunteers and workers and administrators aren’t separated by imagined and manufactured information and divisions, but are instead united in reality and focused on challenges and opportunities that matter.

The fact-checking explosion may have begun in 2004 after the media's initially flat-footed response to the attacks on Sen. John Kerry by the group that called itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (see Campaign Trail Veterans for Truth," December 2004/January 2005). But the just-completed 2010 election featured fact-checking on steroids. A bitterly divided electorate and a political landscape replete with high-decibel claims and counterclaims on cable television and echoing throughout the blogosphere have made neutral arbiters more crucial than ever.

"I never thought journalism would be like this," says Bill Adair, the St. Petersburg Times' Washington, D.C., bureau chief and editor of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking operation that is exporting its approach to local news operations across the country. "It's just the right formula for the new era."

PolitiFact and other fact-checking ventures are filling a void in political reporting, says longtime Washington Post political reporter and columnist David Broder. "So often in the past, the voters have been left with nothing but a 'he said, she said' — there was no third source with an objective view," Broder says, asserting that reporters are the people best equipped to serve as the arbiters of truth.

"'Who are the alternatives?' is the question," says Broder, who has covered politics for the Post since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. "In this respect, the press is becoming a little more aggressive, and that's good."

Politicians, many of whom may despise the idea of having their every word — not to mention every advertisement — scrutinized by reporters, are taking notice of the fact-checking teams. "The candidates hate these," says Rick Wiley, a national political consultant. "It's hard for them, because they see it as people coming out and attacking them personally."

–via The Fact-Checking Explosion from American Journalism Review. A good look at the pro fact checking organizations out there.

… My program scripts are combed through for most of Monday by a team of researchers. Even then, on several occasions our young web producer has spotted errors that somehow slipped through the net.

On the whole, the fact-checking system works pretty well. In a hundred-odd programs, we’ve made seven mistakes that we’re aware of – four of them, frankly, trivial. The three others resulted in on-air corrections as well as an acknowledgment of the error on our website.

In two of those, the problem was that the mistake wasn’t obvious. A good fact-checker has to look at a statement that looks right, and ask herself – could that be wrong?

For example, I said that public servant Godwin Grech denied on oath that he’d passed on the contents of an email to a reporter. Almost every journalist who was writing about the Grech affair made the same mistake, as did Malcolm Turnbull, multiple times. Media Watch didn’t think to check it on the day. Only afterwards did a viewer point out to us that most Senate committees, including the one at which Grech was giving evidence, don’t administer oaths.

On another occasion, we accused journalists of getting someone’s name wrong. They were using her second name, not her first. We should have thought to ask ourselves, “but does she prefer to use her second name?” We didn’t, but she did, and I got egg on my face.

All this is merely to say that complete accuracy is very difficult indeed to achieve. But my view has always been that up-front corrections and admissions of error increase the credibility of a publication, rather than diminishing it – so long, of course, as they are relatively rare (When I lived in Britain, The Guardian became so notorious for its frequent typos that Private Eye dubbed it ‘The Grauniad’. For those of us of a certain vintage, the name has stuck, irretrievably).

Last week’s Media Watch is a case in point. If Twitter is anything to go by – and I’m honestly not sure if it is or it isn’t – my ‘self-pwning’, as the Twitterati called it, went down a treat.

“Ha ha loved #mediawatch catches jonathon holmes,” (Name spelled wrong, @psychosophonist).

“Nicely self-pwned, @jonaholmesMW.” And many more.

My most celebrated predecessor, Stuart Littlemore, was notoriously reluctant to admit error. Even when the ABC’s Independent Complaints Review Panel found against the program, Littlemore contested the findings on-air. And he famously told the American media-watcher Steve Brill in 1997 that Media Watch had made no errors in the previous two years – a remark that prompted Brill to suggest that Littlemore might be the problem rather than the solution.

Of course, on-air corrections are anathema to broadcasters. Newspapers can bury them in small print, usually at the bottom left of page 2. But an on-air correction is in your face. In that respect, the internet has proved a blessing. Broadcasters like the ABC can put corrections on their webpage, and reckon they’ve done enough …

At Media Watch, we’ve been accused of being ‘the fun police’. I hope we’re not. I’m all for vigour and feistiness, humour and wit. But people shouldn’t be unfairly victimised for the amusement of others. And when the media makes mistakes, it should fess up – even without being forced to by lawyers or regulators.

When that happens, Media Watch won’t be needed any more. And pigs will fly.

“In this issue, for example, they checked approximately 9,000 facts, consulting 458 sources (including experts and people quoted) and corrected 312 factual errors”

For more on the value of fact checking, I suggest watching these videos of a speech given by Peter Canby of the New Yorker.

Many marvel over the magazine’s pedantic process for checking the facts in every article, caption, cartoon, poem and work of fiction. I dedicated a chapter of my book to fact checking, and recounted many of the amusing and apocryphal tales of checkers going far beyond the call of duty. For my research, I interviewed two fact checkers from the New Yorker, though only one spoke on the record. I had also approached Peter Canby, the head of the department and a senior editor at the magazine, for an interview. He politely declined.

Fortunately, we both delivered speeches at a recent fact checking conference in Germany, and I had the chance to speak with him. I also shot video of some of Canby’s interesting and amusing keynote speech. He began his talk by stating that it would be off the record, but I managed to get him to allow me to post a few excerpts. Three clips are below.

This one explains how they hire checkers, and the skills they look for:

Here’s some insight into what the magazine expects from its writers when it comes to fact checking:

Canby describes what he sees as the ultimate value of fact checking:

And so it was that I spent the last weekend of March in Hamburg in the offices of the famous German weekly magazine Der Spiegel as a speaker and participant in a conference dedicated to fact checking. I was of course at a disadvantage in that I was one of only four English-speaking presenters; the rest of the conference took place in German.

My fellow North American presenters were Peter Canby, a senior editor at the New Yorker who heads up its fact checking department; Sarah Smith, managing editor of the New York Times Magazine and a former fact checker at the New Yorker; and Scott Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and the leading newspaper accuracy researcher working today.

Nearly all of us who spoke in English couldn’t help but note what a pleasure it was to participate in, wonder of wonders, a conference about fact checking. God bless those crazy Germans. None of us were willing to offer the checker’s guarantee that it was the first ever such gathering on record, but it was the only one we could think of.

The real news of the conference, at least for us visitors, was the massive fact checking operation at Der Spiegel. The other bit of news was that Der Spiegel has a wonderfully outrageous cafeteria and meeting space. You can view all my photos on Flickr, but here’s a sample:

Can you imagine eating there every day? Just looking at it makes me want to buy some shirts with butterfly collars, and grow a moustache. But back to fact checking…

My colleagues from the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker were just as amazed as me to discover the German weekly has roughly 70 full-time people in its fact checking and research department, as well as others who work part-time. By comparison, the New Yorker has 16 checkers, including Canby, making it the major checking operation one of the major checking operations by North American standards. [Update/Correction April 9: Canby emailed to say Vanity Fair has over 20 checkers, making it larger than the New Yorker's department. That's why I struck the text above.]  You can read all about Der Spiegel’s checking in my new column for Columbia Journalism Review.

This slide, which was part of a presentation by the head of the magazine’s checking and research department, illustrated that Der Spiegel’s approach is to hire checkers who have specific expertise in different areas. Here’s a list of some of their checkers (to give you an idea, their medical expert/checker is a former physician):

Though Der Spiegel’s approach is unique, there is one way in which German fact checking is similar to what we have (or used to have)  in Canada and the US: it’s on the decline. Very few publications — someone at the conference estimated there are six in all of Germany — practice it. The tough economic times have resulted in the reduction of staff checkers, and those that are left are looking for new ways to justify their existence.

During my discussion with a Der Spiegel fact checker and the deputy head of the department, they said they are trying to use their internal database of information and sources to generate topic pages for the website. You can view the Angela Merkel topic page here.

For them, one way to ensure the survival of fact checking is to offer something other than checking and research. In short, they’re trying to generate content, not just verify it. The department is also hoping to save time and resources by moving away from paper-based checking and towards a digital workflow. If you wonder what I mean by paper-based, take a look at this slide showing an article that was worked on by a checker (click for larger):

In terms of English-language content, I shot a bit of video of Scott Maier’s talk about newspaper accuracy. He shared some of his research into newspaper accuracy in the United States. (I have more about this research here and here.) Here’s an excerpt:

One quote from Maier that stood out for me: “In America, journalists are better educated than ever,  yet the rate of error is higher than ever. Something is going wrong.” Also, here are photos of some of the slides that were part of Maier’s presentation. These will give you a quick and dirty look at his new data about Italian and Swiss newspaper (which has not yet been published). Click for larger:

Finally, for any German speakers out there, here’s a lengthy TV report about fact checking and the conference:

Here’s a notable section (emphasis theirs):

Is online content, with its rapid turnaround requirement, held to the same standards as material that appears in print? In general, the answer is no. Over half (51%) of original content that appears on Web sites is either not copy-edited at all, or is copy-edited less rigorously than in print. Moreover, just under half (43%) of respondents say that there is either a lower standard for fact-checking online (35%) or no fact-checking at all (8%).

Web sites are more likely to have lower standards in these areas as their traffic rises, and when content decisions are made by independent Web editors.

These bullet points are also of note:

• Fact checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print.
• Web sites with more than 50,000 visitors a month fact-check less rigorously than sites with less traffic.
• Fact-checking is more likely to be lax when independent Web editors are in charge of online content decisions.
• Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the mistakes.
• Error correction rises with Web traffic and profitability, but methods of doing so are inconsistent.
• Error corrections rise when independent Web editors make content decisions, but independent Web editors are more likely than print counterparts or publishers to correct with no notice.

The report has some additional detail (below), but those are the headlines. Some thoughts:

• Scrubbing is rampant. The vast majority of magazine websites are not publishing corrections for “typos or misspellings.” Also note that the report refers to these as “minor errors.” Well, not all typos and misspellings are equal. Yes, a typo that doesn’t change the meaning or reader’s understanding of a sentence (or introduce a factual error) can be fixed without requiring a correction. But what if a typo results in you reporting that Queen Elizabeth “lays up to 2,000 eggs per day”? Would they scrub that, too? We don’t really know. But once you are in the habit of scrubbing, it’s easy to start disappearing factual errors, which is unethical.
• Fact checking is seen as a “nice to have” for online magazine content. It’s been relegated to luxury status. Within magazines, print and online are seen very differently, with print viewed as the place to invest in fact checking and copy editing.
• One thing the report doesn’t make clear is what it means by fact checking. People who fact check for a living often say there’s no such thing as partial or “less rigorous” fact checking. Either check all of the facts, or don’t call it fact checking. So it would be useful to know how these respondents defined fact checking. Are professional fact checkers reviewing the online content? Or is an editor told to, for example, check the names and numbers before publication? It’s possible what respondents refer to as fact checking is, in fact, not in any way related to what traditional magazine fact checking looks like.

More fact checking data from the report:

Fact-checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print for 35%
of respondents (Fig. 19).
• 8% do not fact-check print or online content.
• 8% do not fact-check online-only content.
• 27% say online-only content is fact-checked, but less rigorously than print
content.
• 57% use the same fact-checking process for online-only and print content.
In total, 84% of magazines surveyed do at least some fact-checking of their online-
only content and 92% fact-check their print content.
Figure 19: Fact-checking
Which best describes how online-only content is fact-checked?

More about corrections:

Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the
mistakes (Fig. 23).
• 87% correct minor errors, such as typos or misspellings, with no indication to readers.
• 45% correct factual errors with no indication to readers.
• 37% correct factual errors and append an editor’s note detailing the nature of the error to the content where the mistake appeared.
• 6% leave major factual errors in as they originally appeared in the content, but add an editor’s note at the point of the error.
• 1% note all errors in a special section of the Web site.