If you’ve ever met a dyed-in-the-wool fact-checker trained in one of the iconic editorial departments that revere the practice, you’ll know they’re just built differently. Where you see an innocuous sentence, they see words and phrases rife with assumptions, historical references, cliche, or some other anti-fact issue.
Few content teams have someone with such a keen eye for facts. And honestly, the kinds of content businesses publish rarely require the rigor expected by publishers of long-form investigative journalism.
All content teams do, however, need everyone to buy into and use the following practices.
Inventory the facts and fact-ish details in your content.
Just as you copyedit every piece of content before publication, each piece should go through a fact review.
Someone (not the writer) reads the piece and highlights all the facts and fact-like sentences. These include the sentences or phrases that depend on interpretation or source selection. Group the inventory of…