When we pick up a magazine and read the news or other stories contained within its pages, we tend to trust the writers and have faith in the magazine as a reliable source of information. But from the point of view of those who produce the magazines we read – the publishers, editors, and writers – the process of verifying that the printed word represents reality is not a vague or magical one, and it depends upon the professional role of so-called “fact checker” editors.

These individuals are employed by magazines – and by newspapers and television news stations – to do the background work to double check sources, verify quotes, and back up statements that are made to ensure that they are genuine. If the fact checker doesn’t do a good job, an error can be made which results in loss of faith on behalf of the readers and subscribers to a magazine. Or worse yet, it can result in a lawsuit if someone is maligned by the article through statements that are false. So the fact checker is sort of like the police for magazines, in terms of making sure that nobody perpetrates a fraud or misrepresents things that are written about within the magazine’s columns and feature articles.

A fact checker is a kind of copy editor. Copy editors are those who go over articles one last time, right before they are published, and checks for things like typos, bad grammar, or misspellings. Once the copy editor finishes a final polishing of an article, it is ready to go. So a fact checker has a similar job, which will usually happen in an earlier phase. The fact checker will normally check the authenticity of a piece that a writer submits, before it goes to the final copy edit. And during the fact checking process, the fact editor will have to do actual detective work or background checks, not unlike the kind of checks that a human resource officer at a company might do prior to interviewing or hiring a job applicant. Or if you decide to rent an apartment, the landlord might do a fact finding mission to make sure you have a decent credit history. In the same way, the magazine fact finder or fact checker is assigned the task of calling around to make sure that whatever is written about in the story is not only true and accurate, but it is also not copied or plagiarized from some other magazine or book.