It's old, but maybe this is the promo video for fact checking. Or not... http://is.gd/mVF1

How would you fact-check whether a magazine does, in fact, check the facts?

Great article and wonderful concept. We encourage this at http://www.MagazineCircus.com and are running an excerpt of this on our site. Good luck.

Interesting idea - a campaign to point out how painfully inefficient print media is while simultaneously demonstrating how utterly clueless the industry is to the nature of networked communication. That magazines need a "fact checker" is an extension of the print medium's most troubling qualities - stagnancy, rigidity, inflexibility, permanence. These are the things that are pushing people away from print and toward living digital information. You see, on the internet fact checking is done - and remarkably well - by a cadre of experts, aficionados, enthusiasts, and other interested parties - in realtime. If something is wrong - it is immediately corrected. Links to factual information and supporting arguments are only a click away. The ecology of the web makes it by and large a much better tool for finding fact and truth than print ever could be. Don't get me wrong - print has it's advantages (mostly aesthetic) over digital media - however, being an effective tool for quickly finding and distributing and correcting factual information (or any information) just isn't one of them. Our industry needs to learn that belittling the work of new, digitally based competitors is simply not a way forward. When we try to separate ourselves - position ourselves as the only keepers of quality content - we only succeed at looking self absorbed. There is a lot of quality work being done on the internet - on blogs (gasp!) - and we need to recognize and respect that.

Allan, I like your idea, though I'm not sure how one would or could police fact-checking standards. Still, I hope that bodies such as Magazines Canada do tout this competitive advantage when selling magazines as a medium. That's why (clever plug ahead) I entitled my bookAfter the Fact: A Guide to Fact-Checking for Magazines and Other Media.

I hear what Michael Turro is saying, but what about all the folks who read the wrong information that is 'out there' and accept it? And never go back -- why should they -- to see corrected info? As an editor who pushed for fact checking years ago with my pub, a city mag, it remains a point of pride that we do this and impresses those we contact. Are we perfect? No, but it beats taking what comes in the door and slapping it into mag -- print or Web site based. I imagine our margin for error is considerably lower than bloggers, et al. I certainly like the idea of the check mark, and have passed the article along to our publisher.

Michael says "[On the web] If something is wrong - it is immediately corrected." I say "Prove it". The suggestion that any error on any website is immediately found and fixed is so ridiculous that I can't believe any other word in his comment. In fact, I consider that statement itself to be an error and I would like to see it fixed. Immediately.

Many publishers verify their pre-published print and electronic content to look for authenticity or plagiarism, previous publication, or possible misuse by using our web based service, iThenticate. Some of the largest online content providers and thousands of journal editors use our service in their editorial process. I would welcome the opportunity to be involved in your discussions and possibly become part of the credibility process. Jeff Lorton jlorton@ithenticate.com

Ok - here's the fix: If something is wrong - the potential exists to have it immediately corrected. If something is wrong in print you'll have to wait until - at best tomorrow - more likely it will be weeks or months until a correction is issued. When that correction does appear it's outside the context of the original article rather than being a part of it - like it is right here in this comment thread. We have to let go of this line of argument that seeks to privilege magazine and other old model content. It's counter productive. The idea that digitally generated content is somehow flawed is nonsense. The Nature study on the error rates of Wikipedia and Britannica ended the argument. It's just a different production model and we would do well to try and learn from it rather than attack it.

Definitely, this is a terrific and timely idea-- not even the movement to fact-check but also the logo or symbol of some type that does indicate to readers that the information is more complete and more reliable than most online content and posts and that it has been screened by a third party. This is without a doubt one bandwagon I would eagerly board!

Todays' consumers (new kids on the block 18-30) think wikipedia is posting fact! Most of the information they read they take as gospel and regurgitate. Yes, we need fact checking - yes we need to campaign and support this, yes we need to endorse magazines and web site where content has been checked and (hopefully) written by academics, industry experts, someone other then some opinionated blogger with time on their hands and a whole lot of nothing to say. Bring on the check mark! Bring back the experts. And lets support magazines and web sites that pay fair dollars to people who have committed their time, their money, their energy in becoming those experts.

I would like to know how many magazines do fact-checking of the sort that Allan describes. I suspect the number is not very high, so this is a campaign that the industry as a whole is unlikely to rally 'round. Personally, I have run one magazine that fact-checks and one that doesn't. The non-checking magazine was never accused of any major error that fact-checking would have uncovered. In the magazine that did check, the process never turned up an error that was worth (to my mind) the cost and effort. Kudos to the publications that spend the money on fact-checking. But most magazines have better ways to invest their scarce resources.

Thank you all for your comments. My intent in writing the column was to get people talking about fact checking so, to a degree, mission one is accomplished. To address a few of the comments: 1) Regarding "real-time" updates of electronic info. I'm inclined to agree with Dave G's position. User-generated content (like Wikipedia) is so easily manipulated (by Stephen Colbert's Nation, the writers on 30 Rock � who, for a time, had 'corrected' the Janis Joplin bio to include the facts that she speed-walked everywhere she went and had a fear of toilets � political staffers, etc.) that old-fashioned writers (like myself) know enough to only use them as the basis for questions to ask, ahem, "legitimate" sources. And if wading through a list of posted "Comments" (is anyone actually reading this???) and then judging from the poster's cryptic handle whether or not they're an authority is how someone is supposed to find the corrected information, I don't think many (any?) readers would bother. 2) A waste of scarce resources? How important is your publication's credibility? Having fact-checked hundreds of articles (from 100-word front of the book items to full-length features) in the last dozen or so years, I can't recall a single one that didn't have at least one or two mistakes (and often many, many more). Granted, many of them were fairly minor (misspelled names, transposed numbers, etc.). I freely admit that these kinds of factual errors are easily corrected online, and that's where the web does trump print (I particularly like the stroke-out format that bloggers like D.B. Scott use to indicate corrected info). But I�ve also found my share of embarrassing errors (quotes attributed to the wrong source), anecdotes or information that a writer misunderstood so completely as to present their opposite meaning and, on the rarest of occasions, things that were just plain made up (James Frey never would have gotten near Oprah�s couch if his Million Little Pieces had been fact-checked). Regardless of whether a mistake is big or small, every one that a reader notes calls in to question EVERYTHING else that's in that entire magazine. Assuming that most other Masthead readers would agree with me that the death of print has been greatly exaggerated, magazines, with their long shelf lives can't afford to make mistakes, big or small. Besides, this misses the larger point of the column: Fact-checking could (and, in my mind, should) be used as a marketing tool to promote magazines. Of course, some market research would need to be done to see if readers would actually perceive a value to knowing that a particular magazine was checked. Perhaps one of the larger publishing companies could tack on a few questions about the value of checking in a reader survey�? 3) How to police the program? I�ve come up with a few different possibilities. (I�m sure others could come up with more.) Most marketing programs of this nature require participants to pay a small administration fee. The money could be used to hire checkers (I know a couple good ones�) to check that the magazines that claim to be checking really are. And, to quickly address the, �You expect me to find more money in my budget?!?� reaction, a couple freebie options: A) Participating magazines could agree to have their stories spot-checked by fellow participants. One magazine�s checker could randomly look up X-number of sources from X-number of another�s stories each month/quarter/year and take an hour or two to ask a few basic questions: Did a fact-checker from Magazine Name TK contact you prior to publication? Did they verify the spelling of your name, title, and company? After reading the published article, were there any quotes or anecdotes attributed to you that you found to be in error? B) The program could be aligned with the various journalism schools across the country as a checking and research exercise. Participating magazines would agree to allow J-school students to check a certain number of their published pieces. (Obviously, no one would want to hand off unpublished manuscripts.) I think that if the students began the calls with a line to the effect of �Hi, I�m a journalism student at School TK and we�re part of the auditing process for the magazine industry�s Name TK program�� and perhaps simply using the same set of questions mentioned above, it would negate any ill-will from being pestered. (I know sources I talk to are usually quite happy to know that a magazine cares enough to try so hard to get things right.) And having to dig up the contact info and sources for unattributed facts would probably make the task a valuable research assignment for the students. FYI, I've contacted Magazines Canada to see if they're interested in following up on this idea. We'll keep Masthead readers posted.

Allan, this is a great idea, and your follow-up comments are exciting. I'd support some kind of initiative along the lines you propose. The growth of free and real-time internet content has pushed us print folks to renew our sense of what makes magazines distinct / worth having in this new context. While Michael Turro is right about the more-or-less equivalent accuracy levels of online content, it's the question of preventative checking, followup and correction that matter here. This culture of accuracy exists in academic research, magazines and investigative newspaper journalism. There is certainly lots of lively online correction going on, but not consistently or across the board, and not preventatively, which is key. If knowledge today is experiencing a kind of Wild West growth, then online correction is like vigilante justice after the fact, and magazine fact-checking is like a settled frontier town, with a sheriff and some basic laws discouraging wrong-doers. Grocery stores now have "Health Check" symbols, the internet has "secure server" payment processes, and we all benefit from the work of the Canadian Standards Association, which tests our consumer products. So what we're really talking about here is how, in the midst of exponentially-expanding knowledge industries, some new objective third-party standard for accuracy in reporting would be a good idea. Ironically, the internet itself has inspired this latest round of magazine soul-searching, by being so lively and ubiquitous, the same way that photography forced painting to reconsider its identity in the arts last century. Within the magazine industry itself, separating the checkers from the no-checkers would be a great thing--the added pressure to be accurate would benefit us all in numerous ways. I support any positive efforts to be more accurate -- and to remind readers and advertisers of the stability and trust-worthiness of magazines.