Interesting—is there something small and replicable that a piece of software could help you do right away?
Also, I lump 1) and 3) together in my mind as not-quite-objective, analytic content, but I admit that was poorly expressed.
Also, I lump 1) and 3) together in my mind as not-quite-objective, analytic content, but I admit that was poorly expressed.
Fact checking is a huge problem. I'm not sure if call it a hair-on-fire problem. But it's certainly pissed me off on any number of occasions. Typically, what happens is that I'll write a story mildly critical of BigCo. The PR department at BigCo will catch wind of it, then email me and my editor with as many small "corrections" as they can muster, in an attempt to take down the piece.
When I say corrections, I don't mean broad facts. I mean infinitesimally perceptible technicalities. For instance, I might report someone's title as the "VP of Strategy," because that's what's listed on this company's website and on the person's LinkedIn page. But the company's PR group will come at me, screaming bloody murder, because the guy's title is actually "VP of Strategic Initiatives." They'll do this because they're unhappy with the broader criticism I'm leveling against their business -- so they want to pick away at as many nits as possible. It's a guerilla harassment tactic.
Now, you might well ask: aren't I just being sloppy? How hard can it be to fact check everything? The answer is: it's damned near impossible to catch everything. Some of this information is conflicting across multiple sources. Some of it's out of date or inaccurate. And some of it's not even publicly available, and you wouldn't know you're slightly off until someone corrects you. (Case in point: the "Strategic Initiative" example, a nonsensically titled internal promotion that was never made public.) Add to this the immense pressure of weekly deadlines, and factor in how much time I need to spend ideating, researching, writing, and editing in the first place, and you see how little time I have to get every last thing 100% accurate. I'd love to be 100% accurate 100% of the time, but given my constraints, that's rarely feasible. It's like asking an engineer to write flawless, bug-free code at a hackathon.
I'd love a piece of software I could run my stories through, which would analyze my piece against a public data set (Google, for instance) to check for factual accuracy in all these little places. Or at least a piece of software that would throw up red flags on unverified statements, for which multiple, conflicting data exists on the web. Sort of like the little, red underlines on automatic spell check.
Perhaps that's not a big enough use case or TAM. But broaden it out. I'd love a better way to compile Google research about any given query. This is why I'm rooting for the stuff Wolfram is working on, though I'd love a more modifiable and specialized front end for professional users.