PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Brooke Borel is a contributing editor to Popular Science and a freelance science journalist. She teaches fact-checking at the Brooklyn Brainery. Borel is the author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World, also from the University of Chicago Press.
Every journalist, editor, and nonfiction book writer should have a familiarity with best practices of fact-checking. This is an exhaustive yet highly readable guide by a knowledgeable author. --David Zweig, author of Invisibles and former Conde Nast fact-checker Few aspects of journalism are as complicated as fact checking. Brooke Borel's mantra is 'Think like a fact checker.' This useful book will help you navigate the shoals. --Peter Canby, author of The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya and New Yorker fact-checking director Students, teachers, journalists, professional fact-checkers, bloggers, librarians and consumers of media in general all stand to gain valuable knowledge and insights from this book. -- Reference Reviews An indispensable resource in the age of 'fake news, ' this slim but informative title offers writers, researchers, and journalists best practices for fact-checking in a wide variety of media. --Best Reference Titles of 2016 Library Journal For writers, both professional and amateur, Borel's Guide should be considered essential. . . . And lest it may be thought by some 'I'm not a writer; such a book doesn't really pertain to me, ' if you gain nothing more from reading it than an improved ability to rationally and systematically assess the veracity of what you read or hear reported via whatever medium though which you gather your news of the world, your time spent reading it will be most certainly well spent indeed. -- Well-Read Naturalist Many of the tips she offers here are useful not just to fact-checkers, but also to reporters and researchers, particularly the chapter on checking different kinds of facts. . . . She's especially good at explaining the different levels of attribution, which many journalists don't completely understand, and how scientific studies and statistics can be misunderstood and manipulated. She reiterates one piece of advice so often it almost seems like a mantra: When in doubt, ask an expert. -- Chicago Reader The volume of publishing is so overwhelming--and the quality often questionable--that readers easily give up on an author's piece as soon as they hit a little bump and go find something else to read. Borel's guide builds a strong argument for including fact-checking in the publishing process and then teaches you the full process. -- Copyediting
