Dataharvest-EIJC21

You want every single detail in your investigation to be correct because your credibility relies on it. If you write that “the fence is blue”, it had better be blue and not green. But do you have a well-working systematic approach to your fact-checking?
Investigative editor Nils Hanson introduced a quality control mechanism when he became editor of the weekly investigative Swedish tv program Mission Investigate. It has several steps – from the pitch, where every possible aspect of the story is analyzed and criticized, to the final days before publishing. Then the manuscript is scrutinized from start to finish. In this line-by-line approach, every single word in the investigation is checked and crosschecked: How do we know that? Which document does that come from? Have we heard the other side of that allegation?
Nils Hanson will share his methods and give examples in this session. And what he may be too modest to mention: The method works – the program Mission Investigate got 10 international awards in the final two years with him as an editor.