In Sping 2019, New Corp began serious work towards creating a year-round fact-checker for Colorado readers and media tentatively called Factable. Think of a PolitiFact tailored for local journalism, but different in that we will try to combine video and a little attitude with print analysis.
The team of Chuck Plunkett (director), Emilie Johnson (instructor) and Tammy Rae Matthews (Ph.D. student and fact-checker editor) guided CU News Corps students to seek to produce solid, publishable, quality long-form print and multimedia pieces of investigative or explanatory journalism that meet our profession’s ethical standards. The students were tasked with significant individual work and asked to report in teams. A key focus was to develop their abilities to interest professional newsrooms in your work. They also helped in the preliminary round of developing a CU News Corps fact-checker, a powerful tool for the public in which we will take on the critical service of testing the reliability of political claims and arguments made at the Colorado legislature, in state government and in large and small cities and towns.
In Summer 2019, Emilie Johnson guided the students through Steamboat to create productive content for CU Boulder's new Water Desk.
Please find Chuck Plunkett's TEDxMileHigh here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR_jBlB-fj8