Let Laura M. Browning teach you to check facts.
April Fool’s Day is a perennial pain-in-the-butt for sites like OTYCD. Facts matter, and we don’t want to risk posting a story that could be taken as a prank.
We’re going to play it as safe as we can by reworking a post from April 2017 about how to fact-check.
The link below will take you to a Google doc from 2017 written by Laura M. Browning, a professional copy editor who has trained others to check facts. She titled the document Fact-checking in the Age of Trumpism for obvious reasons, but its strength and validity hasn’t diminished one bit now that Trump has left the Oval Office.
Read Laura M. Browning’s deft, incisive, and blessedly short (barely five pages) paper on how to fact-check:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E0m6GEQwwTnOk3-mWrC6zZs60wDJBh9IH-yfpl3TRvM/edit#
Follow Laura M. Browning on Twitter:
@ellembee
Also see a 2016 NPR story with the creator of fake news who claimed that left-leaning readers were harder to trick:
And here are links to Snopes and Politifact, which Browning recommends in the paper:
Lastly, if you’re deathly curious to read what we originally wrote about Browning’s paper, here’s the 2017 story:
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