By Brendan O’Meara
Wudan Yan (@wudanyan on IG) reached out to me over the summer saying she was starting a fact-checking agency. I had long wanted to speak with fact checkers about fact-checking (and I plan to speak with more), but this seemed a good opportunity since Wudan wants to drum up some attention to new business, Factual.
Nieman Storyboard, with a story penned by Madeline Bodin, gave Wudan a nice bit of attention and, by extension, important attention on facts, this in an age when many people are deeply distrustful of media and people can’t even agree on what a fact is.
Wudan has been on the show a number of times, each unique, so maybe give them a shot. Aside from that, I’m not sure what else to say.
TL;DL: What Does a Fact-Check Look Like?
Brendan: What prompted you to want to start this a fact checking agency?
Wudan: The seed for those things usually comes many, many months in the past, in a different version of myself. And so I had this idea for a while. It started crystallizing at the beginning of this year, so early 2024, and leading up to that, in the years leading up to that, what I was experiencing was that managing editors of newsrooms were approaching me — not to fact-check stuff, but they just wanted referrals. And if you’re the managing editor of a publication, it’s actually your job, people pay you to build freelance teams. And so I was like, you’re asking me — a freelancer who is a fact checker, and also cognizant of the greater ecosystem of freelance fact checkers out there. And I know many of them, and I can connect you. And so at first, as most freelancers do, was just like, yeah, here you go, unaware that, like, what, what I just gave them saves them four to five hours of their time of vetting other fact checkers and adding them to their system. I was just handing them out like candy.
And after that happened once or twice, and I felt kind of weird about it. I was like, should I charge a referral fee? And then I started charging a referral fee to authors, and managing editors, and nobody made a fuss about it. And so what I was doing here, it was just like gathering evidence for myself that people wanted this matchmaking service, and they were willing to pay my very nominal fee for it, and that kind of gave me the idea of scaling it up, not to mention that as I continue freelancing and continue fact-checking the work, the inbound leads that I have far exceed my personal capacity to be able to help and if my mission as a journalist and a fact-checker is to make sure that unverifiable facts do not make it into the greater media ecosystem then, like, it would make more sense for me to kind of match them to somebody else who is vetted for, who has spoken for, and can do a good job and help whoever on the timeline that they need. So yeah, that was the seed.
Brendan: I have never fact-checked, and I have never been fact-checked. Really, if I’m being honest, I haven’t done anything that’s substantial enough to have been fact-checked, but for someone who’s never been through it what is the ringer through which a quality fact-check entails?
Wudan: I think we actually need to back up a step and talk about what fact-checking is and what it means today in the context that we’re talking about because one thing I learned while putting together this agency and reviewing applications is that people have so many definitions of what they think fact-checking is. Like I said, my mission is making sure that unverifiable facts or false claims do not get propagated, right?
And so the only way to do this is by a pre publication fact check, which means the fact checking is happening before something goes live and is sent out into the internet verse. But what I learned is that other journalists will put other things under this fact-checking umbrella. Newspapers, for instance, usually don’t have a dedicated fact-checker on the team. They might have a copy editor, but then I will have writers be like, oh, yeah, I fact-check my own story. So that’s confusing. What they did was basically double check their work. But when we’re talking about pre publication fact checking, that’s really similar to peer review in science, and that is the scientists will study, will submit a study, other experts in that field will review and scrutinize the methods and the results in this discussion, and be like, do the things that these scientists are claiming? Are they actually true? Do they match with the data?
And so as a fact-checker, we are basically doing that peer review with somebody else’s facts. You cannot fact-check — I’m doing air quotes here — but you can’t fact-check your own stuff in the traditional magazine sense of fact-checking.
Now the third type of fact checking. That people call fact checking is post-publication fact-checking, and this is what we’re seeing in an election year of like politician X said this on social media, on Fox News, so and so, what’s the evidence supporting or negating that? And that doesn’t really help the cause of making sure that false facts don’t continue to propagate, because already that false fact has been has been in existence, and now we’re just kind of debunking it. So debunking claims, I would not consider the same as pre publication fact checking.
So now to answer your actual question of what, what happens during the fact checking process is that the reporter, hopefully, once the story is in a more final draft, the reporter will send an annotated version of their product, magazine story, a book, a podcast script, a documentary script, and annotate every single fact. They provide a source for where they are that helps back up a claim that they’re making, and somebody else, a third party fact-checker, who has had nothing to do with the story up to that point comes in and independently verifies every single fact for accuracy, and we’ll check that against publicly available information. We will do our own research. If something just sounds off to us, we will suggest changes for accuracy and provide sourcing for why we think a particular change should be made and why, and by the end of this like fact check consultant, consultancy is over. What the reporter or the documentary filmmaker or whoever, gets is a report where they see every single fact that has been checked, the sourcing for that fact and all these suggestions for accuracy that would help them create an accurate work product.
