• by Sara Guaglione , May 8, 2017

New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd has turned her attention to the newspaper’s fact-checking team, advocating in her Sunday column for the unit to expand beyond its one member.

Spayd criticized the NYTs’ “late entry” into building a fact-checking team, which other publishers, such as The Washington Post, have created in response to the spread of misleading and fake claims in politics.

“The New York Times likes to proclaim its supremacy over all competitors in all categories. But it’s barely on the scoreboards in the journalistically fashionable realm of ‘fact-checking,’ ” she wrote.

Spayd continued: "Newsrooms across the continents have been building rapid-response reporting teams to evaluate the statements of political figures and assert whether they're telling the truth. But one is only just now arriving at the Times, and so far, it has one employee.”

The one employee is 24-year-old Linda Qiu, poached from PolitiFact by NYT masthead editor Carolyn Ryan, who has been “pushing internally for a fact-checking unit for some time,” Spayd wrote.

Qiu churns out two to three pieces a week. One of her articles was an assessment of every accomplishment the president claims to have made in his first 100 days in office.

Qiu joining the NYT was an “initial step toward staffing a fuller team,” according to Spayd. Ryan is looking to find an editor for the team, as well as working to give its fact-checking pieces “more graphic appeal."

“Our readers have shown us they want real-time fact-checking, and they respond very powerfully to it,” Ryan told Spayd in her article. “We need to build it out, and make it more prominent on our Web site and easier to find.”

Fact-checking teams are comprised of researchers who determine the validity of key political claims, by “combing through old news stories, speeches, past interviews, scientific and medical data, expert opinions, anything that could help distill fact from opinion. After that, the statements get rated, from the truthful to the ridiculous,” Spayd wrote.

She noted that The Washington Post hired its fact checkers two presidential cycles ago. The WaPo's team is made up of two fact-checkers. A third was recently hired to produce videos from fact checks.

Fact-checking is growing in popularity. Nonpartisan sites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have received a wave of readers and viewers. PolitiFact had three times the traffic last year as it did the previous year and double what it had in the 2012 election, according to Spayd.

Poynter claims more than 100 outlets around the world now check the statements of politicians, which is up more than 50% in the past year.