Speaker
So a 5,000 word magazine article, magazine standards are probably the strictest among different industries that are looking at fact checking now compared to book fact checking, compared to podcasts and compared to documentary. And I say this because typically for the magazines that I fact check for, they want me to call back people, like get in touch with the sources who were included in the story, especially if something was unclear. Okay. And, you know, it's changed so much with multimedia because now we have great AI transcription services that helps us organize all of our tape. And so if somebody said something and they signed a release waiver saying that they will talk to, you know, a reporter for a podcast, like I don't have to call them up. There's no need for that. But for magazines, you know, if you're calling people up, I mean, depending on how complex and fact dense the story is, it could take 30, 20, 20 to 30 hours. I'm not the best estimate of time at this point because I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm pretty fast at it. But yeah, kind of thinking outside of my own brain, how much that might take. um Yeah, it's a substantial amount of time. What are some of the harder conversations you've had to have with a writer of a story when they you have when you run into the roadblock where like I was unable to verify this? The hardest roadblock I had was fact-checking a story many years ago and realizing that the sourcing for the central argument of the piece wasn't really being supported. And that was not a conversation I had with the writers. I took that directly to the editors because when I presented them with like the evidence of why those claims are unsupported, the editors then had to make the call of what to do with the piece. They ultimately killed it. And I'm glad that that's a conversation I didn't have to have with the writers. But, you know, like I was in the story document being like, source? z Clients who have hired me know that my favorite, you know, the favorite question that they get from me is just like a little comment on a Google Doc, my name shows up and all I'm asking is source. e Right. So um but I mean, there have been other, you know, contentious situations. And thankfully, the more the more that people fact check, honestly, the more writers who are exposed to it, the more frequently they may be exposed to it, too. And that kind of normalizes the collaborative process by which fact checkers and reporters work together because it really is collaborative. I mean, sometimes like earlier in my career, some writers would get super defensive. And I think my question was like, why? Like, what is that in service of, right? Like, I'm trying to help you. Like, my intent is to make sure that like you have an accurate product. Like you're an expert. You spent months, if not years reporting on something something and I don't want you to be discredited for like the smallest thing you know and so it's like we're on the same team here please don't demonize me yeah because what you'll run into or at least as a writer like you could have the greatest details but the minute like even just something is a little muddy or wrong like the most innocuousuous detail being wrong, that'll just kind of call into question everything. And you don't want your credibility to be ah muddy just because, I don't know, you got the weather wrong on a certain day. People are going to be like, well, what else did you get wrong in this? I don't know if I can trust you anymore. Exactly. That's exactly it. I just worked on Rebecca Nagel's book, By the Fire We Carry, which came out September. And she is sharing about all the people who helped make the project happen on her social media. And she shared this funny thing about me on her Instagram that was just like, Wudan was like a great fact, something to the tune of Wudan was a great fact checker. Like I wanted to say something about looking at a picture window and Wudan was like, is that really a picture window? Because picture window means a very specific thing. Like that's the kind of fact checker I am. Right. um Because, you know, what if somebody is just like, oh, this lady doesn't know what a picture window is. I don't want that to happen. That's so silly. And one thing I like on your, on your website of like breaking down, you know, various, uh, elements of the fact checking, um, multiverse is, uh, this, this element of how best to organize your reporting material for a fact checker. So to talk a little, to unpack that a bit too, because that I imagine that lubricates the system. Definitely. So, you know, sometimes I get on discovery calls with people who have never worked with a fact checker before. And they talk about, we start talking about the expectations of what an annotated draft looks like. And I always make it very clear to them that like, my role is called the fact checker. I am not the fact finder. Fact finding is a lot more synonymous with reporting. And so, you know, I impress on that potential client that they are responsible for sourcing all the material. And I will say, you know, fact checking was the first thing I learned about journalism. um I quit a science PhD program to do journalism and I deliberately didn't want to go to a graduate program. And so when I emailed around magazines, they were like, this woman has no experience doing anything. She should probably learn like the brass tacks of journalistic research. Let's teach her how to fact check. And so day one in my inbox is a feature report that needed to get fact checked. And that not just came, did not just come with a Word doc that had annotations, but it also came with a giant folder of stuff, of um interview tape, of PDFs, of studies, of emails, you know, like everything. And seeing that organization, I was like, oh, like this makes so much sense. And now I tell people that like, if you wanted a visual of my brain, it's a like Russian nesting dolls of folders and folders, because every like, that's how I organize my own reporting material. And it's a lot easier when I annotate a story that gets fact checked, and somebody else is just able to come in and peer inside the brain and like open the dolls and be like, what's in here? What's there? Like what's in room, you know, what's in this secret room over here. So yeah, like having good organization really helps the fact checking process. And, you know, for big projects like books, sometimes people already have their own ah ways of organizing. But I've also heard from book authors like, oh, it'd be really great to have somebody to just like, come over and help me organize all my files for fact checking, because they know like, having something super organized and streamlined is just going to expedite the fact checking process. For books specifically, I'm always really taken by how short the timeline is to get something checked. Nonfiction books, 70 to 80,000 words. And sometimes authors are coming to me being like, I have six weeks to get this fact checked. Can you help? Yeah, that that sounds like a yeah like a nightmare, especially if you get into like biography of 105,000 words or or longer, that that it could take like upwards of ah several months to do it well. and And who knows who has that much time once it goes to copy edits. There isn't enough time, really, because galleys go out shortly after copy edits. So the the degree to which a publisher is probably willing to invest in fact check is probably we just like don't have the time to do it. what I don't know. something I feel like you can't afford not to have the time to do it, to do it well, to do it right. Yeah. I mean, thank you for asking the question up front about like the 5,000 word magazine story and how long that takes. I mean, books, thankfully, book chapters are usually 7,000 to 8,000 words average, if not a little more, depending on kind of the partitioning of words into chapters, given the 70 to 80 K word length I alluded to, you know, like, thankfully that chapter doesn't take 20 to 30 hours. Cause then you're just looking at something monstrous. Like somebody can be working on it full time for a few months, right. If that was actually the,