For PR People: This Is How Fact Checks Work

I recently wrote to a vendor’s public relations person, asking her to fact-check an article written by one of my authors. The results were irritating. Or laughable. Or something. I was tempted to chew her up and spit her out (honestly, you never want to get on my bad side). Instead, I wrote a long mentoring how-to explaining what journalists expect PR people to do when they’re asked for a fact check. Maybe it’ll help you, too.

A fact check is performed to ensure that the author did not make factual errors because we want to publish accurate information. It may be done by the author himself, by his editor, or by a (usually junior) staffer at a publication.

We want you to tell us specifically what is wrong and needs to be adjusted. It’s an opportunity for you to respond, “Oh, there are three of those, not two!” so that nobody has to blush, much less correct the article after it’s been published.

So if my author had miscounted, I would expect you to list the omitted item and ideally to link to a page that details it. Don’t just say “There are three, not two!” and never tell me what the third item is; the idea here is to publish the correct data, not to make the editor or writer go on a hunt.

The ideal way for you to respond would be something like this:

The author wrote:

> There are two methods of torture in the Spanish inquisition: surprise and fear

It should be:

> There are two methods of torture in the Spanish inquisition: surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY )

…and if the rest is fine, you don’t need to say anything (other than maybe “The rest is fine!”)

As an aside: If the author got the information wrong, contemplate how he may have done so. Does your website have a page with a feature list? Is it inaccurate?

The fact check aims to check facts. It is not an invitation to edit the article,because we know that no PR person could resist doing so (any more than my mother could resist “fixing” my hair).

So you are (almost) never shown the entire article, just the list of items for which we want confirmation. You may well receive a bunch of sentence snippets and bullets (including a few with odd grammar due to copy and paste). Don’t expect any flow to the text. Don’t edit it to make it more readable; that isn’t your job. Certainly, don’t edit it to add your company’s messaging; the PR person who inspired this post added “best of breed” to describe a feature the author had mentioned. (That’s a phrase that I would edit out in anyone’s copy.)

This PR person was gracious about my mentoring. Perhaps it will give you a few ohms of enlightenment as well.