A Few Tips For News Fact Checking

In a previous post I asked whether or not news bloggers should do more fact checking. In this post I’ll share a few tips for fact checking. Most of these are easy to follow and take little time, but will help ensure what you are writing is as accurate as possible:

1. Depending on the subject, Wikipedia may or may not be a good source, but it is almost always a good basic reference.
2. Find the blog/site that originally posted about the news item, and read it there, not on the blogs that link to it (but feel free to give them credit by posting a “found via” link). Most of the time the original article is more accurate than the derivative articles on other blogs and sites.
3. If a post is about a company releasing some new product or service, check their website and other sites for a press release
4. Sites with good track records can be trusted, but even they can get it wrong.
5. Even big media can toss opinion in a news article or make it appear to be a very one-sided issue. Depending on the topic, if an article is one-sided then some facts were probably removed to make it so.
6. If you received a tip and are writing about it, remember, an anonymous source or an insider telling you something is not a confirmation. It should be treated as unconfirmed gossip, not as fact. One of the biggest problems with the Internet is so many news sites treat rumor as fact.
7. In the case of rumors, the source’s accuracy in the past should play an important role in whether or not you post about it, nobody says you have to post every bit of info just because some random blog wrote about it.
8. Surveys can be quite misleading, especially when reported in news articles. I could go out and survey 10 people in San Fran or NY City and ask if they use Macs. Let’s say 7 of them say yes. I could report “70% of people use macs” and quote the survey without lying too much. This is an extreme example, but you get my point. Look at the raw data for a survey, not the summary about it.
9. If it seems too amazing to be true, it’s probably false. Would you believe a news article that claims George Bush is a space alien? Unfortunately a lot of foolish reporters would.
10. Use your brain. Look at the source and use your gut feeling. Being a reliable news source is more important that posting about every single thing 10 seconds after the news breaks.

When I used to run a tech news blog I followed all of those tips and was only wrong 2 times out of 300 or so posts. Not too bad. There were several dozen occasions when news I omitted wound up being false (it gave me a nice warm feeling knowing that). I will admit that sometimes fact checking is incredibly difficult, and your own instinct will play a good role in how accurate your reporting is. Sometimes you will still get it wrong, it happens, but at least if you practice good fact checking procedure you will be right most of the time.

Oh, and one last thing. “It takes too much time” is about the lamest excuse in the book. At one point I used to post 8-15 times per day on that news blog. Even with that many posts per day it only took 45 minutes to an hour to go from reading about the news to writing about it. It literally only took 4-8 minutes per post to do any research needed and write it. “It takes too much time” is not a good excuse.

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?