Your guide on how to annotate just about anything for a fact-checker

When I left my Ph.D. program a decade ago, and Nautilus magazine picked me up as an intern, the first skill they taught me was to fact-check features. As a former researcher, I loved studying how writers more experienced than me made all the pieces of a story click together.

Many who are trained as fact-checkers ‘age out’ of fact-checking. Fact-checking is usually a gateway to writing full-time, or any other editorial job.

I decided to continue with it because I actually love learning about various topics and digging deep into them to learn how things really work. Meanwhile, I’ve served on boards of organizations dedicated to make fact-checking more accessible to others, given talks on how to bring fact-checking to different mediums. I’ve fact-checked essay anthologies, award-winning books and podcasts, and now — I’ve taken that decade of experience and condensed it into a guide for YOU.

Because the truth is: unless you get trained as a fact-checker, nobody really teaches you how to annotate — not necessarily during internships and not in most journalism graduate programs.

Not when magazines tell writers that they’ll get fact-checked.

Not when writers are about to get their first nonfiction books fact-checked.

Not when a podcast series is about to move into checking.

And as a writer myself, I’m rarely given a publishers’ guide on fact-checking and best practices.

That lack of standards and expectation setting almost always leads to some hiccups during the checking process.

My guide aims to streamline the fact-checking process, by telling you what the standards are in annotating a piece of nonfiction - whether its final form will be in print, audio, or on the big screen.

This is for you if you’re a…

• creator, who wants to learn how to better annotate anything for a fact-checker

• professor, who wants to teach best practices for annotating, fact-checking, and keeping track of reporting notes to your class

• managing editor or supervising producer who oversees fact-checkers and want to enforce standards for annotations

If you fall into the latter two categories, please contact me at wudan.yan@gmail.com to inquire about a pricing for a license.

Otherwise, you can buy a copy here! Please feel free to share this widely with folks in your network who can benefit from such a resource.