Just finished reading @DerSPIEGEL's report on how Claas #Relotius duped them, and all I can say is #factchecking clearly means something different in Germany, because most of what he got away with never would have flown at a US magazine with fact-checkers. spiegel.de/international/…
"Every text printed in DER SPIEGEL," they say, "goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article." As far as I can tell from their mea culpa, this vetting process is limited to what can be Googled from Hamburg.
I've been preparing fact files for 19 years, and they always include phone numbers and e-mail addresses for all my sources, copies of any documents I cite or relied on, and often photos of signs I describe. Translators and fixers? They get called too.
A source who wants to remain anonymous, or who might react badly to a fact-checking call, is the subject of extensive discussion with editors. If I repeatedly, or for multiple sources in one story, told fact-checkers not to contact people, it would ring major alarm bells.
A friend who worked as a fact-checker for @NatGeo long ago once spent days getting the janitor of a particular building in India on the phone to verify the number of lightbulbs on its facade.
Did a @WIRED fact checker take my word for it that my source was smoking during our interview, as I described the scene? No, she worked through a 9 hour time difference to ask the source. She also double-checked the brand of cigarette.
Two years ago I did a story for @BicyclingMag that relied heavily on sources in Berlin who didn't speak English, and they hired a German journalist to follow up with the people I talked with and verify details.
Last summer I told the fact-checker @PopSci the Russian biologist I was interviewing would be in the wilds of Kamchatka and therefore unavailable for a #factcheck. He asked me to make sure I recorded my phone call with her so he could review it later. THIS WAS FOR AN INFOGRAPHIC.
I started out @usnews, which at the time was also a weekly magazine -- they had an amazing staff of fact-checkers that could do all this on tight deadline.
Publications that work extensively with freelancers -- which is most magazines these days -- can't and shouldn't trust everyone out there to get things right. Real #factchecking is insurance. Ask @brookeborel, or buy her book. But Google spot-checks aren't fact-checking.
For @DerSPIEGEL to claim that no publication is safe from a dishonest journalist may be true. But it's also clear that they didn't try very hard -- and if they had followed best practices standard at most major US mags they might have caught this a lot sooner.
(I mean, for fuck's sake -- the last story he did apparently ran with a FILE PHOTO of a protagonist. No one checked the photographer's caption information?)
I am adding this here for those who want a #longread insight into how this is done @newyorker, which has a reputation for being the best/most absurdly thorough fact-checking department in the US: newyorker.com/magazine/2009/…
There is also a play about fact-checking on Broadway right now starring Daniel Radcliffe: nytimes.com/2018/10/18/the…
