Fact Checking for Online Journalists

It is common knowledge that in the digital age journalists must be both quick and accurate when writing stories. There is a stronger-than-ever need to be the first to post a breaking story online. Conversely, the internet brought about an age where readers can fact check stories for accuracy so there is also a very strong need for journalists to get the facts right the first time they write a story.

Now Full Fact, a UK-based fact checking website has launched an online Finder to help people find information and facts quickly. The finder covers information about five topics: economy, crime and law, education, health and immigration.

The website used to just produce documents and stories with facts, discussing whether the media or politicians were correct in their statements. Now, however, this new Finder tool helps the public to do their own searching.

For journalists, this means two things.

The first is that they can use the tool themselves. They can use it to check their own facts and to check facts of other media organisations. The Finder tool will help make finding and checking facts easy.

However, it also means journalists are more accountable then ever before. The public can search to see if what a journalist has written is correct. They can also read articles on the website which detail particular fact findings.

For example, the image above is a copy of the website's homepage today. As you can see, the second link on the page is to a topic that analyses a claim made by the Daily Mail. Clicking on the link will lead you to an article where Full Fact either proves or disproves the claim by looking at facts. For a journalist, this means your inability to fact check will be known by those who check the website and read articles, or simply by those curious enough to check out your claims.

At the moment Full Fact and the Finder are fundamentally focused on the UK. However that is not to say that the organisation could expand in to other countries or that other countries could develop similar websites dealing with facts in the media.

The idea for this piece came from www.journalism.co.uk.