The day I became a fact-checker at The New Yorker, I received one set of red pencils and one set of No. 2 pencils. [FC: There used to be a training period before the pencils.] [[VH: O.K. for “the day I became a fact-checker” to designate end of training period?]]
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Fact-checkers also consulted periodicals. The department subscribed to virtually everything and kept newspapers archived on microfilm. Cautionary tales circulated about errors that originated in The New York Times or The Washington Post, only to be replicated and memorialized forever by lazy magazine fact-checkers relying on single news stories. Proper protocol was to consult microfilm of the paper but then to check the next few days’ papers, also on microfilm, on the chance that a correction had been published. This was labor intensive, especially when there seemed to be bigger conceptual fish to fry in complex articles about, say, the O. J. Simpson defense.
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In short, fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.
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