Annual subscriptions are marked down to only $40 during this month’s subscriber drive—that’s half off the regular price. Don’t miss this deal!
Today, I want to introduce you to Katrina Janco, the freelance fact-checker I plan to contract with once we hit our subscriber drive goal. Katrina’s an independent reporter, researcher, and, of course, fact-checker based in South Jersey.
She trained at The Nation and has brought her fact-checking prowess to over 20 outlets in the five years since. That has included contributing to award-winning reporting for Texas Monthly, The Margin, and Type Investigations—for those who aren’t familiar, those last two are heavy hitters in the investigative space.
I asked Katrina to answer a couple of questions about her work, to pull back the curtain and help you understand a fact-checker’s role and why I like working with Katrina, in particular. Here’s what she shared:
Marianne Dhenin: What’s your approach to fact-checking? How do you see your role or responsibility as a fact-checker in relation to the writer and the audience?
Katrina Janco: As a fact-checker, I provide a fresh set of eyes and work to ensure the published piece is accurate, fair, thorough, and up to date. The easiest way to describe the job is that it is a combination of a researcher and an editor, and you need to be skilled at both to be an effective fact-checker.
My goal is to ensure readers are receiving the best information possible and that it is presented in an accessible way. For the writer, my goal is to ensure the piece is as strong as possible within the constraints of the outlet’s resources and other external factors, and that any structural weaknesses or areas that could be a source of legal exposure are minimized. (I am not an attorney and cannot give legal advice, but I can attest to the importance of words such as ‘allegedly.’) In short, I try to make both the writer’s and the readers’ lives easier.
MD: What's something you wish more people knew or understood about the behind-the-scenes work of fact-checking and why it’s important?
KJ: Most readers don’t understand how editorial production in journalism works, and that most media workers, and especially fact-checkers, are independent contractors. In fairness, as an industry, we do a really poor job of explaining these circumstances to the general public. But this is relevant to fact-checking because we usually don’t have the final say in what is published. So, for example, if there is something problematic in a piece, the fact-checker may have very well flagged it, and the publication chose not to heed those calls.
Some of this is logistics; the fact-checker usually arrives very close to publication, and too many resources have already been invested to retract or substantially change the story unless necessary to avoid a potentially very expensive lawsuit. It can also be due to toxic internal politics at a publication, where some writers are held to different standards due to seniority or other arbitrary factors. In short, fact-checking can only do so much if the outlet is poorly managed.
