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My name is Lucy Tassell and I’m The Daily Aus’ full-time fact-checker. Everything TDA does, from Instagram posts, to the podcast, to TikTok, to our sponsored work, goes through me. Fact-checking is a behind-the-scenes job most of the time, so I’m excited to make a cameo on the other side of your screen today.

A Broadway sound engineer once told me that people typically don’t notice really good sound design at a live show, but they know immediately when it’s gone wrong.

Fact-checking is a bit like that; ideally it’s invisible to the reader.

Today, I’m going to take you through what my job actually entails.

Making sure an audience of half a million young Aussies, many of whom don’t get their news anywhere else, have access to accurate news is a heavy responsibility everyone in the newsroom feels.

With those obligations in mind, every story at TDA goes through a rigorous editing and fact-checking process.

First, journalists will pitch a story. Pitches can come from a variety of places – from an email from a politician's staffer, a DM from a reader, or even talking to people working at their local supermarket.

Journalists are then assigned stories by editors. Once assigned, they’ll call people, read reports and conduct interviews. The top priority for every story is that we always have a primary source.

Then, once a story has been edited, it comes to me, and I start asking questions. Is this an accurate representation of what a person said? What are we missing? Can we back each claim with a primary source?

This is how it typically goes. But I’ll also help journalists along the journey of a story to help them find a primary source.

For example, I recently worked with our TikTok superstar Chloe Christie on a story about the Optus outage. Chloe had seen on Google Trends that searches for other telcos spiked during the outage, from which she inferred that people with Optus plans were looking to switch to a different provider based on their hours of lost service.

But lots of people searching for the words ‘Telstra’ and ‘Vodafone’ during the outage doesn’t necessarily mean they wanted to ditch Optus. It could have meant they wanted to check if the outage was more widespread than just Optus. When Chloe reached out to those other telcos (primary sources!) she didn’t hear anything conclusive.

Later on, though, Telstra’s CEO confirmed in a speech that they had seen an increase in people signing up, and Vodafone finally responded to Chloe’s requests with confirmation that they too were having a great month of sales.

The lesson here? It’s better to be slow and right than fast and wrong.

As our co-founder Zara likes to say, “we’re not saving lives here.” That means we prefer to do our research before we hit ‘post’.

There are times when we can go fast. When there’s a primary source available immediately, and it’s something our audience needs to know about, we spring into action. My favourite example of this was when Jacinda Ardern resigned. From someone looking up at the TV to see her live press conference, to a completed post up on @thedailyaus, it was eight minutes.

I’m equally proud of the times we’ve waited to be sure. The day that Donald Trump’s mugshot was due to be released, the whole editorial team had about 25 tabs open, refreshing various news sites to see it when it dropped. I was also working to access the official Fulton County Sheriff’s website to try and get a crisp .png myself, but having no luck.

CNN was first to post the mugshot. For many terrible minutes, they were the only news site to do so. I was suspicious: the watermark in the corner didn’t look like the other similar mugshots posted in previous days, and the image looked like one I’d seen circulating on social media for the past hour and assumed was a fake. Turns out, that social media pic was real — a mystery I’d love to solve.

If CNN had posted a fake, and we’d followed them, our credibility would be shot. There’s nothing more important to me than knowing our audience trusts us.

Recent data suggests less than half of Australians trust the news. That’s a chilling statistic for me, not just because my job is to make sure people can trust TDA’s stories. It leads me to wonder where people are getting their information if they don’t trust established news sources, or if they are seeking out any information about the world at all.

There’s also the ever-present threat of misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is wrong but accidental, disinformation is wrong and deliberate.

For example, misinformation is when a website gets someone’s name and age wrong, and disinformation is the malicious rumour that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

As a person who came of age in the mid-2010s, it seems to me like the one-two punch of the 2016 U.S. election and the COVID-19 pandemic completely destabilised people’s relationship with the truth.

Examples of disinformation continue to be all around us: just this week, Federal MP Barnaby Joyce made a social media post sharing a conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination.

There’s a lot of that kind of noise out there. At TDA, I’m often reminded of a line attributed to UK journalism professor Jonathan Foster:

“If one person says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, your job isn’t to quote them both. It’s to look out the window and find out which one is true.”

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