How does someone become a “Director of Verification”? Make errors, I guess. Then get obsessive about correcting them, and spend a couple years reading and reporting on media errors and corrections from print, online and broadcast media.

Why subject myself to this constant barrage of human fallibility? It’s important to know you’re fallible. And, yes, I have a strange fascination with it.

In grade three or four I confronted a children’s author with a list of the spelling mistakes in her book. (Our class had collected them prior to her visit.) She told me to take it up with her publisher. I went for recess instead.

Now fast-forward to October 2004 when I launched Regret the Error, a website that tracks and reports on media errors and accuracy. I saw an opportunity to raise the issue of media accuracy in an entertaining, engaging way and (hopefully) inspire journalists and the public to think about how we can meet a higher standard.

Presenting accurate information is at the top of every media outlet’s list of priorities, but it’s clear that we could be doing a better job. In these times of media monitoring organizations, partisan blogs and heightened scrutiny of the press, errors have become more corrosive to the reputation of the press than ever before. Not only can we do better, but today we have to do better. It’s easy to say, but difficult to pull off.

Regret spends a lot of time drawing attention to the errors and challenges that persist; NewAssignment.Net is about building solutions. That’s where you come in. For me, a big goal of NewAssignment.net is innovation in the prevention and correction of errors in networked (and mainstream) journalism. Also to see whether distributed pro-am fact checking can help achieve this. My job is to lead this effort.

Working with the NewAssignment.net team and you, we will conceive and deploy a distributed fact checking system to check and verify the information contained in NewAssignment.Net stories. We’re going to use a combination of people, protocol and technology to do this. But the heart of the system is the people. We need motivated, competent folks – you – to come together and create a powerful force for fact checking. Our goal is to mix the wisdom of the crowd with the best practices and technology available to achieve accuracy and transparency.

In the end, we hope to build a distributed fact checking software application that could be used to by any journalism project or group to organize and manage their checking process, and to create a global distributed network of fact checkers that can be called into action.

Like NewAssignment.net itself, we’re trying to show how experienced journalists can work with amateurs to create a new model for the way stories and reported and verified.

I was drawn to this project because I see the potential to create something new.

My involvement with New Assignment began shortly after Jay Rosen publicly announced the project. I sent him an email offering my help with any fact checking that needed to be done. From there, we started talking about open source, networked fact checking and I began working to envision what a system like that might look like.

Jay eventually asked me to become the Director of Verification, which struck me as a title fraught with risk because the buck would stop with me in terms of accuracy. But the nature of this project means that isn’t totally the case. It’s going to be a group effort to build the system and attract checkers; and it’s going to be a group effort to check and verify articles. We share the risk, we share the reward.

Many people say that errors will always occur in reporting, that they are a fact of journalism. Today, that’s true. So how do we fix it? What does the perfect distributed fact checking system look like? How do we build and manage it?

Those are some of the questions we start with. Where they lead is up to all of us.

When I’m not immersed in the glorious work of errors and corrections at Regret or writing my book about media errors and accuracy, I am a freelance writer based in Montreal.

I’ve written for outfits like The New York Times, The Globe And Mail, Montreal Gazette, Report On Business, Report On Small Business, Toro, Editor & Publisher etc. I also write a column for Hour, a Montreal weekly. I do writing and research for documentary films, and also take on the occasional corporate writing gig. I was fortunate to have recently done some writing work for Mozilla, a project I admire.

One of my stranger moments in journalism came when I was hired as a stringer for In Touch magazine to trail a contestant on The Bachelor and see if he kissed any women. (He didn’t.) I’ve also been involved with three magazine start-ups, two of which published (albeit not for long) and one that died on the vine.

After graduating from the journalism department at Concordia University, I freelanced and worked at one of the aforementioned magazine start-ups before catching the dot-com fever and joining a technology company. I worked there full-time for three years, and continued to work on writing projects as a consultant after I left. (Okay, I was layed-off). Then I came back to journalism.

To the best of my knowledge, four corrections have been published to articles I have written over the last decade. Four too many. I also run corrections for errors made on Regret the Error, and you can read them here.

If you’d like to read my professional disclosures, you can go here. This is my professional site where you can read some of my work. You also might want to check out this interview with me.

That’s me. Now I want to hear from you. Especially if you share my strange fascination with the humane art of verification.