Fact-Checking Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

Fact-checking is a discipline whose output is a judgement, published under an organisation's name, about something a person in public life said. The people checked have platforms, lawyers and supporters, and increasingly a strategy of attacking the checker rather than the check. What protects the organisation is not being right — it is being visibly, reproducibly right, in a document a hostile reader can follow from the claim to the evidence without taking anything on trust.

We edit what fact-checking organisations and newsroom verification desks produce — individual fact checks and their verdicts, rating scales and their definitions, methodology and transparency statements, sourcing and evidence standards, corrections and update policies, right-of-reply correspondence with those checked, explainers on how claims are selected, verification guides for images, video and provenance, election and referendum coverage protocols, partnership documentation with platforms and newsrooms, funding and independence disclosures, media literacy and training material, and annual and impact reporting to funders. Our editors check that the verdict follows from the evidence presented and that the claim checked is the claim that was made.

The verdict wording is where fact-checking is most often undone, and the failure is usually a mismatch of scope. A politician says a policy "has cut waiting lists"; the check establishes that lists fell for two of four measures over eighteen months, and the verdict says "False", which is defensible only if the claim was that all lists fell for the whole period. We rewrite these so the claim is quoted exactly, with its date and context, before anything else; so the verdict addresses that claim rather than the strongest or weakest reading of it; so the rating's definition appears alongside the rating rather than on a separate page, since the reader who disputes it will otherwise dispute a word they have defined themselves; and so any part of the claim that is true is stated as true before the part that is not. Checks written this way survive being quoted by the person checked, which is the only real test — and they are markedly harder to characterise as partisan, because the reasoning is on the page rather than in the organisation's reputation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including checks before publication, correspondence with those checked and funding material. We are editors rather than researchers or lawyers, and we offer no view on the truth of any claim, on any rating, or on legal risk. What we can do is make the reasoning traceable and the wording exactly as wide as the evidence.