The New Yorker, Fergus McIntosh [unpaywalled]: “What is truly extraordinary about any fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, nearly 30 people work in Checking at The New Yorker, “It is labor, at scale, that produces accuracy.”…“Fake news” is not a new concept, but many Americans now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody, perhaps even the federal government, should do something about it. There seems to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news—globally, fears of an “information war” are rising—and, despite endemic skepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?…

The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, to install a fact-checking department, and since then checkers have left their marks all over the magazine…Not many pieces require such heroics: the reality is that fact checkers are busy people, who traffic only occasionally in the dark arts of deep research. Most facts can be checked fairly easily today, especially with the benefit of the Internet, but, since there are so many, a checker has to prioritize. (Merriam-Webster defines a fact as “a piece of information presented as having objective reality”; a long piece might contain thousands.) When a particular fact turns out to be sticky, persistence and attention, rather than any kind of special knowledge, are generally what’s needed. Checkers are not infallible, and their successes are mostly due to hard work and creativity. What is truly extraordinary about any fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, nearly thirty people work in Checking at The New Yorker, almost all of them full time. It is labor, at scale, that produces accuracy…”