‘The Pub’ #107: Accuracy matters more than ever — so check your facts

More

J. Tyler Franklin/Louisville Public Media

Erica Peterson

You’ve done your interviews, written your script and filed your story. But did you do one last fact-check?

No longer just for magazines or long-form projects, some public media newsrooms have begun to apply more robust fact-checking to their daily and feature work.

Our audiences expect our stories to be accurate, and on top of that, they expect our journalists to hold newsmakers to account for falsehoods that come out in interviews.

But how do we balance the need for rigorous fact-checking with the daily pressures of filling newscasts and covering our communities? WFPL News Director Erica Peterson shares what her newsroom has done to avoid errors big and small.

What is your newsroom doing? Share your fact-checking tips (or horror stories) with me at [email protected].

Please subscribe to The Pub in iTunes or your favorite podcast app and leave us a rating and a comment! That will help boost our search results and allow people to find the show more easily.

We welcome your feedback on the show: You can reach me on Twitter; Current’s digital editor, Mike Janssen, is at [email protected]; and you can contact Current generally at [email protected] or on Twitter.

If you’d like to offer a comment to be used in the program, please send on-mic tape (recorded in a studio, with a kit, a smartphone, anything) to [email protected] either as an attachment or through Google Drive. Please keep it short!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *