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Episode 437: Much Ado About Fact-Checking with Wudan Yan
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Wudan Yan (@wudanyan) is a freelancer writer and founder of Factual, a one-of-a-kind agency committed to fact-checking.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Tease
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm doing air quotes here, but you can't fact check your own stuff in the traditional magazine sense of
00:00:14
Speaker
lacing and effort this is the creative nonfiction podcast show where i speak to people about telling true stories beta narrative journalism essays memoir documentary film podcasts we do it all, at least we try to, most of the time, a little bit. I'm Brendan O'Meara, how's it going?
Wudan Yan's Return and Humor
00:00:31
Speaker
Wudan Yan is back on the show, third, fourth rodeo, who knows, not sure. But maybe if there was an astute fact checker, we'd know one way or another. Fitting that, that's the topic of this conversation. Since Wudan is a long time fact checker.
Factual: A Fact-Checking Agency
00:00:49
Speaker
She has since founded a fact checking agency. Titled Factual. Website being factual dot.work dot.com. Think of it like a dating app. That can match a writer or editor. With the right fact checker for a project. There at our website, you can learn about the process, how to apply to be one of Wudan's fact checking minions, how to annotate for fact checking, etc, etc.
The Importance of Fact-Checking
00:01:16
Speaker
In this conversation, we chat about the importance of a pre-publication fact check because once misinformation gets loose, it's often way too fast for the fact to catch it. This idea of post-publication fact checking you see everywhere that is basically a news organization debunking things. Again, once the misinformation cat runs out of the bag, good luck changing someone's mind. ah There's also ah how how writers can help the fact checker out and how fact checking your own work isn't really fact checking at all. You can learn more about Wu Dan at her website, wudanyan.com or follow her on Instagram at wudanyan. She has written for several publications over the years like Undark, Popular Mechanics, The New York Times, and many others as well. She hosts the Writer's Co-op podcast.
Origins and Growth of Factual
00:02:10
Speaker
You know what, man? Let's just, let's invest in the fact
00:02:14
Speaker
man we need to agree on what facts are do here we go riff
00:02:30
Speaker
you know what prompt togue to want to basically start is a checking agency if you will oh my gosh Well, as you probably know, ideas for ventures or big creative projects, the seed for those things usually comes like many, many months in the past um 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, like 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 like, I know many of them and I can connect you. And so at first I was, you know, as most freelancers do, just like, yeah, here you go. um'm Unaware that like what what I just gave them is saves them four to five hours of their time of vetting other fact checkers and adding them to their system.
The Fact-Checking Process
00:03:57
Speaker
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 like nobody made a fuss about it. And so what I was doing here was just like gathering evidence for myself that like people kind of wanted this matchmaking service and they were willing to pay like my very nominal fee for it. And um 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 like, you know, and unverifiable facts do not make it into the greater media ecosystem, then like it would make more sense for me to kind of matchmake them to somebody else who is vetted for, who is spoken for and can do a good job and help whoever on the timeline that they need. So yeah, that was the seed. And then earlier this year, I was like, I think it's time to make it happen. I have never fact checked and I have never been fact checked. Really? i have never yeah I've never done anything of... What? Yeah. ah live i have but If I'm being honest, I haven't done anything that's substantial enough to have been fact checked on the list. So, but, but for someone who's never been through it, like what, what is the, the w ringer through which a quality fact check entails? 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. yeah 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 like unverifiable facts or false claims do not get propagated. Right. And so the only way to do this is by ah it's by what's called pre-publication fact-checking, 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. For instance, you know, like newspapers, for instance, are 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-checked my own story. So that's confusing. What they did was basically break down, they double-checked their work. But when we're talking about pre-publication fact checking, that's really similar to peer review in science. And that is, you know, the scientists will study will submit a study, other experts in that field will review and scrutinize the methods and the results in the 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, right? Of like politician X said this on social media, on Fox news, so-and-so what are, what are the, 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 ben has been in existence and now we're just kind of debunking it. So debunking claims, you know I would not consider the same
00:08:04
Speaker
ah pre-publication fact checking so now to answer your actual question of what what happens during the fact- checkcking process is that ah reporter hopefully once the story is in a more final draft the reporter will send an annotated version of their product, their magazine story, a book, a podcast script, a documentary as pre-publication fact-checking. script, and annotate every single fact. That is, they provide a source for where they are that helps back up a claim that they're making. And somebody else, a third-party checker, who has nothing, 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 um by the end of this fact check consultancy is over, what the reporter or the documentary filmmaker or whoever the creator 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. And for, let's just use a 5,000 word feature as an example. um ah How long, maybe this is relative, but how long can that typically take a fact checker to to comb through? It depends.
Challenges in Fact-Checking
00:09:52
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,
00:18:22
Speaker
the amount of time they needed yeah yeah and it's ah something ah that i've done it's it's a clunky way of writing but i like to c sight as i write and it it can be very like i said clunky and i'll I was footnoting things, but then I realized I needed to kick it out to end notes. Either way, I would cite it and then I would link to a Dropbox folder that I the amount of time they needed. have where the stories reside. So it's like, to me, that strikes me as a more seamless way for if anyone's going to check, like that's a way to do it. Is that how you like to see it? Like a link to where the story is or a PDF of it in a folder somewhere. So it's like, okay, this is, this is easy for me to find at this point. Yeah, definitely. Earlier this year, I can't remember what sparked it. Probably I was frustrated by how people were annotating stuff for fact checking. And so I created a guide. It's called how to annotate almost everything for fact checking. And it's like an eight or nine page PDF. I can't really remember. I sell it like for 50 bucks and individual nonfiction creators can buy a limited use license for their own creative projects. And it just like outlines how to annotate everything. If an article is behind a paywall, don't assume that everyone can get it. Like download a PDF and put it in a folder, right? Like include a link to that and just like figuring out ways to streamline the process. Because too, like if you're writing something like a book and you want to go back and edit it and you're just like, oh, now I have to like describe this scene in a completely different way or paraphrase this experience that a source had and say it completely differently. Where am I going to find it? Like, it's also good for you as a creator to be able to have something in a reference. And what are some unique challenges that are on the, on the vanguard of fact checking with AI starting to encroach on
AI and Fact-Checking
00:20:23
Speaker
things? So how are you seeing the nature of fact-checking changing as we proceed? What do you mean? Yeah, say more about the AI connection. Like how are you seeing AI helping with fact-checking or not? I just mean in terms of not knowing what things are real or what could be uh you know what i mean completely made and not that ai as a ai might be able to be like a nice tool to leverage uh in some capacity i don't know what that would look like but i just mean in terms of how can we trust that this image is real or yeah this information. So, oh God, it's, it's getting tougher because I mean, the week that we're recording this, I am fact checking a magazine feature and it's not a topic I'm super familiar with. So I type everything in Google and Google now at the very top gives you an AI generated, generated response. And I hate it. I hate it so much because before it would just give me the top hit of like, this is the most reputable journal article that touches on my search queries and so on and so forth. And then I can just go to that journal article. But now I have this AI generated summary that makes it seem like it has what I want. And like, I can't trust that. Like it's AI. It just mashed a bunch of words on the internet together around like kidney function and disease. I'm just spitballing, but you know, that's really dangerous. And I think hopefully all the fact checkers who are really rigorous in their approach can see that for what it is and scroll down the page. And as someone you cut your teeth as a fact checker and you've been doing it for a long time, what is it that you like to see in aspiring fact checkers or skilled fact checkers? What's the table stakes for being very good at this? there are so many nuances of fact checking. And when I opened the application for Factual, I was looking for people with very different skill sets, people who have worked on projects that could have been potentially litigious, people who are skilled in parsing apart science, people who have done, you know, who have fact-checked investigations and like narrative and memoir,
Skills for Fact-Checking
00:22:52
Speaker
you know, also goes a long way because with memoir, for instance, there's a lot of reliability, of reliance on the author's memory and own experiences. And like, you kind of don't want to always poke at those, right? Like, especially if it's their own lived experiences, at least that's how I established the ground rules with people, if I am checking a memoir of theirs. And so, you know, there are just so many ways to dig deep into fact checking. And I mean, to come down to the heart of fact checking, it's a question of who is telling me this? Why might they be telling me this? Would they be biased in some way and kind of repeat that process until you get to a source that is potentially as neutral as possible. And I think, yeah, there's just so much scrutiny that needs to be applied to litigious works or investigative works or scientific works that I feel like there are just so many ways to learn more about fact checking and specialize as well, if that's something people want. And, you know, like on your website, too, where you give a pretty well mapped out way to kind of kind of kind of break in or, you know, the criteria under which you're looking to vet fact checkers and to and they and, you know, you offer some insights into gaining that degree of experience. And so for someone who might be like wanting to add this to their portfolio of services, like how, how might you coach them to kind of break into it and get the kind of skill that would, you know, attract you to them? Yeah, I would say reporters are well suited to become fact checkers. I think what a reporter needs to learn is the position of the fact checker as like a middleman who like needs to maintain good relations with the writer, with the editor and with all the sources, right? Like it's, you're kind of like a mediator at the same time you want to do the job well. And so I think if you have been a really scrupulous reporter for different magazines or outlets, and for those outlets, you've gone through the editorial process, you've been fact-checked, approach those contacts at those publications and be like, hey, I'm looking to build out my fact-checking experience. I've really loved working with you as a reporter. Would you have space for me on your fact-checking roster? I had an experience when I was editing the opinion section for the Eugene newspaper in town for a few years. I would try to check and vet whatever people were sending in for letters to the editor and guest opinions, as you might imagine. It was some pretty zany shit. But one particular writer I had, she was just out of high school, but she was looking to be a writer, and I was kind of just coaching her up and trying to help her get a column in. And she grew up here, so I trusted that she had a certain knowledge that she didn't have and ran a column that she wrote for Sunday. So it was kind of the more visible day. And it turns out there were things that were so categorically wrong and false about it. If it were a different age of journalism, I should have been fired just for greenlighting it. I trusted her that she knew certain things about the school systems around here, that me as someone who just didn't grow up here, I don't know the school systems. I'm not an education reporter. So I just trusted that she knew this and turned that she was just so off base. She had to run a retraction. One of the school districts threatened to sue. I mean, it was ugly. And yeah, my editor was like, did you know any of this? I'm like, no, I put my trust in the writer in this regard. And it got read above me, but no one really thought much of it because it was just so fast. And it ran the next day. It was just like a shitstorm on a Monday. And I was like, yeah, different era of journalism. I would have been out of work. But they were just like, yeah, let's just be a little more careful next time around. And, you know, yeah, if you don't get certain things right, if you have a bad fact check or don't do it well. Yeah. People's reputations and jobs are on the line. Yeah. And again, like I want to go back to kind of the collaborative aspect of producing any work of narrative nonfiction. And I try not to be terrible about calling out, calling out instances where fact checking was completely ignored. But one of the better and more recent stories is regarding the podcast Caliphate, which won awards, was put on by the New York Times. And it is about a man who was an ISIS agent, and then he basically left and went to Canada and so on and so forth. But after Caliphate won a bunch of awards, it was discovered that this man's story was not true. And there was no fact checker for that show. There was a huge team of other producers and editors and so on and so forth. But I think like the point I'm trying to make is that as journalists, we should apply scrutiny all the time. We should always be questioning, like, like not just thinking like, oh my God, this is such such like an an amazing or salacious story, but what is the sourcing on that? How are we corroborating this claim rather than just throwing stuff into the world because it's a good story? And in situations when so many people have a hand in producing a work of narrative nonfiction, it's never one person's fault. It's everyone's fault for not saying something, see something, do something. Right. So, um, yeah, that is, that's how I feel in situations like you described, right? Like you were editing your, your weren't called to back check. You weren't right. Like, so where roles are limited, I think it's just like everyone kind of needs to recognize that like anyone in the process can play the bad cop
Investing in Fact-Checking: Author Experiences
00:29:11
Speaker
if needed. Oh, and I had Michael Finkel on the show a couple years ago at this point, I was really good book. The Art Thief came out as real, real fun book, good book. And he, he told me he paid for two fact checkers for his book out of his advance money. And I ran him like a good, probably like a good eight grand, I think, for two fact checkers. And we talk a lot about fact checking here. And for people who might want to independently fact check their stuff or they have a little advance money, they, you know, should I invest in fact checking? Like, how much can, let's say, 100? Well, how do you set your price? And let's see, like, how much would a 80,000 word book cost typically? It totally depends on what the author wants me to do. So even for the agency, like the interesting about an agency is that I am managing a team. I have a team who helps me operate the business. So there's more overhead, right? Like people need to expect to pay more to hire the agency than just me independently. But then they get the benefit of having like an easeful matchmaking situation to a vetted fact checker. And also like me setting the standard of what fact checking looks like if somebody is going to get something checked by factual. Right. And so, you know, the price is only just going to go up. But the thing that I try to impress on anyone who's trying to get anything fact-checked, whether it's a 80,000-word book or so on and so forth or eight-series narrative, limited release narrative podcast, is why is this so valuable to you to have an accurate piece of work? And then how do you think about that value in terms of literal dollars? And this kind of weeds out people, you know, who are just like, oh, fact checking would be nice to have, but like, I only have $2,000. Well, you're not going to get very far. Right? Like, that's going to be very limited. So then I have a conversation with somebody about how we can limit the scope of fact checking and make that money make sense for both them and me. Right. So it is an ongoing conversation. It's really hard to put a price tag on, you know, or paint any price tag in broad strokes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know that it's tough. Yeah. And it is truly case by case. You know, like, oh, you hear people on the show, for instance, talk about, like, hiring an editor. They're like, oh, well, what does that look like? And sometimes it can be several thousand dollars for a developmental edit. It's like, wow, shit, like, that's, I don't have that kind of money. And then it can be prohibitive to invest that kind of capital in work, even if it's going to make the work better or more sellable or just a better piece of art. It often can be just like, I guess there's a chance I'm willing, I got to take either to invest or a chance to not invest and hope things work out. It's tough. No way around it. It's just kind of tough to sometimes have to swallow that pill and it just feels like it's lodged in your throat the whole time. Yes, I find that to be especially difficult for book authors who are typically limited by the advance. The publisher is not paying for the book to get fact-checked. Their agent is not paying for the book to be fact-checked. The publisher and agent may be pushing the author to get the book independently fact-checked but when I'm working with book authors I get paid directly by them right so it's kind of a matter of like how big is your advance and what can you afford I know authors who have had small advances and kind of just made do with the money that they had and came up with a more like limited way to handle fact checking. But if you want to produce good narrative, good narrative nonfiction that's accurate, like it's expensive. And as the head of an agency of a stable of fact checkers, you know, yourself included, you know, what guardrails or protections do you have in
Contracts and Financial Challenges
00:33:25
Speaker
place? So publications or even individual people who might be well healed can't like come after you if say something slips through the cracks. Yeah, yeah. I mean, having insurance and but also, you know, getting making sure that the contract that I'm signing with the client is really clear, especially with regards to the indemnification clause. So freelance journalists, you know, like, who knows how most journalists smarten up to indemnity clauses, but indemnity clauses are where you can get into legal trouble. You know, if something gets through or even say, just a hypothetical fact checker makes a report, I oversee the report, they catch something, okay, they catch an error, they propose a change for accuracy, and the whole thing goes back to the client and the client decides to not include that suggestion for accuracy. And somehow there's an unhappy person, viewer, listener, whatever, who hears that very specific fact that the client failed to correct for and goes after the client. I want to make sure, like I want to make sure in the contract, like the agency and the fact checker who I match make them with are not on the hook, right? Because we need the receipts that show that we proposed a suggestion, but the client ignored it. So kind of just delineating in indemnification clauses, like who's on the hook when and why. As we kind of wind down a little bit, I imagine there were probably things I didn't ask you that are on your mind with respect to this. And I want to be able to, you know, give you space to, to talk about that. Fact checking is just something that I'm not as privy to. And I imagine having done it for so long that you just, you know, you know a lot about the game and, and, and with your new agency here, which is what else might, might you want to talk about that we haven't, haven't raised so far? Yeah. I mean, I just want to imprint upon listeners the value of fact-checking. I don't think anyone who spent money fact-checking their book has regretted it. I can't think of a single situation of all the nonfiction writers I know who had a book, had it fact-checked, and then regretted it. I think they always regretted not having more money to put towards fact-checking. And the issue with fact-checking in journalism, in media, is, you know, like I learned it as an intern, and people are still learning it as interns. And so people continue to devalue fact-checking because they see it as a entry-level or intern-level, like, task. And it's not, it requires a lot to be a very skilled fact checker. It doesn't, it's not just about research and proposing suggestions for increased accuracy, but it's like, you have to be good with people and the people management. And when you think about these soft skills, in addition to the hard skills of fact checking, of helping do backup research and so on and so forth, what you're really asking for is like a factual thought partner in the creation of a narrative nonfiction product.
Valuing Fact-Checking as a Service
00:36:37
Speaker
And that's extremely valuable. You know, I am negotiating what I consider to be decent deals for me to fact check projects. But, you know, like, this isn't cheap, and it shouldn't be cheap. And I think a lot of incentives have to shift in. It's hard to generalize, right? Because I'm targeting book authors, documentary, film and podcast producers as well, who come to Factual and get a fact checker. And so the incentives need to shift. So book authors somehow, you know, either apply for grants or consider fact checking early on and set aside the budget from that for their, from their advance. And, you know, documentary film and podcast production networks, often they just need to make sure that's in their budget. It just needs to be a line item in their budget. And so kind of just starting up top to create the incentives that will make people want to continue hiring fact checkers and paying them something that isn't an intern level wage. I wouldn't be doing fact checking anymore. I've been doing it for the last decade of my career. Like I wouldn't be here anymore if I was making $15 an hour or whatever I was getting paid, you know, at the start of my career. And I think too, everyone needs to start talking about the like intellectual value of having an accurate product and then mapping them on to a dollar amount. Yeah, that makes sense. I like the idea of instead of thinking of it, this thing you tack on at the end that kind of comes, it's kind of like, oh shit, I didn't budget the last six months to pay for my car insurance and goddammit, now it's due. It's like if you kind of like know about it ahead of time, you just kind of budget it in. And then when that bill comes, you're like, oh, that's right. I've got I've got the money to pay for my car insurance. And it's kind of like thinking of fact checking up top like, oh, OK, there will come a day where I will appreciate this having been budgeted. Let's do this higher rather than at the end of the process. Yeah. And your analogy to an insurance policy is incredibly apt. Fantastic. Well, this is great. I'm so glad we were able to touch base again and celebrate this new venture that you're adding to your stable of services. And this one is definitely one for the public good, I think. So thanks for coming on the show and talking fact-checking. Thank you so much. Sweet. Awesome. Thanks to Wudan for coming back on the show. Hopefully this conversation illuminated a bit of the fact-checking process and you might consider how important it might be to your next project. Kind of build it in. Build it into the budget if you can. I know I will. Or at least I'm going to try. So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can do, sorry, no parting shot. Interview. See ya.
00:40:08
Speaker
you