The History of The New Yorker's Vaunted Fact-Checking Department

"I turned in this piece with seventy-nine errors. Anna, the fact checker who fixed them, has been a member of The New Yorker's checking department for six years. I enjoy working with Anna, which is good, because being checked by Anna involves maybe a dozen hours on the phone. We talk mainly about facts, and occasionally about foraging for chanterelles, which is her passion."

"I've never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: "Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification." New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word. Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art-full of facts."

"My contribution to the trash heap, in this piece alone, included misspelling several proper nouns (Colombia, alas, is not Columbia), inventing, it seems, a long-ago interaction between a fact checker and the deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and writing about a bird's kidney when I should have been writing about its liver. I'm sure no errors remain, but I won't declare it categorically. That kind of thing makes a checker squirm."

Seventy-nine factual errors required rigorous correction, demonstrating how writers routinely introduce misspellings, invented interactions, and biological mistakes. Fact checkers spend hours verifying details, from proper nouns and figures to punctuation, colors, and even whether bird droppings can be yellow. New checkers are instructed to underline every fact in galleys, treating names, numbers, and commas as verifiable elements. Cartoons, poems, photographs, and cover art also contain facts needing confirmation. The checking process involves extensive phone conversations and domain research, and it functions as harm reduction by catching and correcting inaccuracies before publication.

Read at The New Yorker