What Is Fact-Checking, and Why Is It Important?

What is fact-checking, and why is it so important for content creation? If you have these kinds of questions on your mind, you’re in the right place! This post will:

• Describe exactly what is involved in the fact-checking process
• Outline what type of content requires fact-checking
• Explain how to fact-check content

We’ll also share an exciting opportunity to learn all the skills needed to be an expert fact-checker!

What Is Fact-Checking?

Fact-checking involves checking the accuracy and truthfulness of a piece of content. It is a process that usually takes place before a piece of writing gets published.

A fact-checker will examine any facts, statements, and claims made, analyze the credibility of source materials, and then draw conclusions on the quality of the content. The goal of fact-checking is to make sure content is accurate, and doesn’t present any false information. Publishing false information could have significant ethical and/or legal consequences.

It is important to note that fact-checking is different from verification. Verification is a process that often happens after publication. It focuses less on analysis of facts or data, and more on confirming that something is what it claims to be. For example, whether a video clip actually shows the time and place it claims to show.

What Gets Fact-Checked?

Fact-checking is beneficial across a wide range of industries. Common content that can require fact-checking includes:

• Podcasts
• News articles
• Documentaries
• Social media posts
• Scripts for TV programs
• Any other work of nonfiction

AI-generated content is becoming more popular, so it’s important for proofreaders and editors to have the skills required to work on it. While AI tools can be very convenient to use for many content creators, it is quite common for AI-generated content to include erroneous information.

Why Is Fact-Checking Important?

Facts and fact-checking are incredibly important when creating any work of nonfiction. Ensuring the data you use is accurate will help:

• Avoid misinformation
• Boost your credibility
• Engage your audience
• Prevent possible ethical and legal issues
• Make your content accurate and reliable

Proper fact-checking doesn’t just correct any possible errors, it also makes sure the content is of the highest quality. People will enjoy and trust the content more when they can be sure the facts that have been used are all accurate and reliable.

How to Fact-Check

Now that you know how important fact-checking is, it’s time for you to learn how to do it. While many people have their own techniques, fact-checking normally involves these simple steps.

1. Identify Your Information

After you have reviewed the content, you need to identify what information needs to be checked. A good way to do this is to:

1. Read or listen to the content in order to understand what it is about.
2. Review it a second time, paying close attention to what needs to be checked.
3. Make detailed notes to easily reference later.

If you’re working on written content, you could circle or highlight each fact that you need to check. If you’re working on audio or video content, you could either ask for a written transcript to annotate, or keep separate notes that list the information alongside the relevant timestamp.

2. Categorize the Different Types of Facts

After you have created your notes about what needs to be checked, it can be useful to organize them depending on what kind of fact they are. These may include:

• Dates
• Places
• Names
• Quotes
• Statements
• Historical claims
• Images or infographics

Categorizing is an important step to streamline your fact-checking process. Once this is done, you can check each fact with all the other ones of the same type.

3. Collate the Source Material

Your next step will be to contact the author or creator and get access to all the source material they used. They may not be able to provide you with everything they used, but any information they can share with you will help the fact-checking process. At the same time, you can also ask them if there is any specific part of the content that they were specifically worried about. Then, you will know what you need to focus on.

Once you have the source material, you should organize it into primary and secondary sources. While primary sources are the most reliable for basing facts on, they are not always available.

Another thing to consider when collating the source material is to evaluate how reliable the source is. After you have some experience, it will become a lot easier to identify unreliable sources, but some things to look out for are:

• Anonymous sources. Always seek information from sources that can be traced and verified.
• Self-published books. Many self-published books are well-researched, but not all! Look for reviews, endorsements, or other indicators of credibility.
• Political or ideological bias. Some sources may have a particular agenda (for example, a press release from a political party). Always try to bring balance to the content.
• Sponsored research and publications. Sponsored content can lead to very biased results. Independent research tends to be more reliable.
• Blogs. While many blog posts provide valuable information, some may lack credible sources or authors. Always check the author’s credentials, and the publication’s reputation.
• Social media content. Social media can be a great starting point for research, but information should always be verified using more reliable sources.
• Wikis. Much of the content on Wikipedia is user-generated, so it’s best to cross-reference the information with more authoritative sources.

4. Plan Your Analysis

Now that you have identified, categorized, and collated everything that needs to be checked, it’s time to start analyzing and researching. Here is a useful way to get this done as efficiently as possible:

1. Since checking quotes can take some time, start with those. Contact the quoted individuals or organizations to make sure the quote is accurate. While waiting for their response, you can move on to the next step.
2. Next, tackle all the pieces of information that are quick or relatively easy to verify (statistics, spelling, dates of events, etc.). Getting all the easy stuff out of the way will help shorten the list of what you need to check before moving on to the more difficult pieces of information.
3. With the smaller tasks out of the way, it is time to move on to the more complex information. This can include quotes from books, historical references or anecdotes, images and captions, and more obscure statements. To check this type of information, you may need to do a fair amount of online research, track down a book or visit a library, and even contact an expert on the topic being analyzed.

5. Share Your Findings

Finally, once all the facts have been checked, it’s time to communicate what you’ve discovered. You should have already been in contact with the author/creator when requesting the source material, so they should be waiting to hear back what you have found. Convenient ways to share your findings include:

• Making comments directly on a proof version of the document.
• Sending an email, attaching all the information in a separate document. Many fact-checkers use a template to clearly itemize each fact and piece of feedback.

It is common for fact-checkers to have questions for the content creator during the fact-checking process. These should be communicated as soon as possible. If there are multiple questions, they can all be asked at the same time. If this process is going to be time-consuming, it can be beneficial to both parties to schedule regular meetings (weekly, bi-monthly, etc.) to discuss the findings and any questions.

How to Become a Fact Checker

If fact-checking is something that interests you, take a look at our How To Fact-Check course. It goes into great detail on how to identify reliable sources, analyze complex data sets, and effectively apply fact-checking tools and processes. And with our 14-day money-back guarantee, you can try it risk-free.