The leaders of the American magazine industry recently huddled together in Arizona for the American Magazine Conference. Interestingly, a few of the speakers at the event hit upon a common theme: accuracy.

First, Time Inc. Chairman and CEO Ann Moore chastised bloggers and mainstream media for a “lack of ‘fact checking,’ allowing rumors to migrate ‘to the mainstream press’,” according to a report on media minder FishBowlNY. Then People group editor Martha Nelson took aim at the “misinformation and speculation” and “sheer lies” to be found in the blogosphere. (Publicist to the stars Ken Sunshine also piled on.)

It’s interesting to see Accuracy with a Big A highlighted and used as a differentiator by media executives. They want to send the message that the work they do has standards, actual and factual while the blogosphere is littered with rumors, speculation and whole hog fabrications. Beware of Blogs, reads their sign.

Quite a contrast with the feedback I received from regular (albeit very tech savvy) folks when I gave a presentation about NewAssignment.Net at BarCamp Montreal (Oct. 21). While attendees didn’t express total confidence in blogs, they were more interested in discussing the problems with bias and inaccuracy that exist in the mainstream press.

Accuracy is an issue that everyone cares about (clearly!) yet the perspective is very different depending on whether you’re name appears on the masthead or not. Suspicion flows freely and everyone likes to point the finger at the other side. At NewAssignment.Net, we’re hoping to change that dynamic by bringing the two groups (journalists and non-journalists) together in the pursuit of stories, and other fact-finding adventures. Pro-am, some call it. With collaboration should come mutual understanding; with transparency should come trust.

My BarCamp presentation was focused on the fact checking procedures and system we will be developing as part of NewAssignment.Net. We need an open source solution to the checking and verification problems in stories produced by our network of writers, editors and contributors. Volunteers checking volunteers, if you will. It’s an essential part of the project, and of journalism in general.

As my NewAssignment.Net colleague David Cohn has said, we are all fact checkers now. The rise of blogs and citizen journalism has triggered a rise in distributed fact-checking largely aimed at holding the mainstream media and politicians to account. Often, this takes the form of partisan blogs or media monitoring groups rallying their resources and audience to gather information that “sinks” a major media story or exposes bad practice. They serve their point of view by revealing inaccuracies in reporting or in other public statements. Ideology aside, they have demonstrated that motivated groups of people can be brought together for a rough form of distributed fact-checking.

Projects like Distributed Proofreaders, where people from all over the world work together to proofread works for release by Project Gutenberg, show that similar work can be done when the motivation is not ideological. As Hugh McGuire, founder of the very successful LibriVox open source audiobook project, noted at BarCamp, “The problem with ideology is that not everyone agrees with it.”

NewAssignment.Net isn’t driven by any political ideology or point of view. Jay Rosen has expressed our larger goal: “…to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.”

If we are all fact checkers, we also have to remember that we are also people. Will indisputable facts and open collaboration be enough to trump a single agenda or bias? NewAssignment.Net hopes so.

We also hope to build a system that ensures multiple people check every fact, statistic and quote in a NewAssignment article, and we are looking to the magazine model used by major publications like The New Yorker etc. as one guide for determining what constitutes a “fact” or accurate quote.

Creating openness seems doable. Assuring quality is the big challenge, and it was the issue that elicited the most reaction from BarCamp attendees.

They wondered how we could defend against those attempting to push spurious facts or working to discredit information they personally don’t agree with. One person talked about why political journalists don’t have to disclose their voting records or political leanings for all to see. Should we require a certain level of disclosure from our contributors and checkers? One woman who works in the PR industry also asked how we could defend against astroturfing. Others mentioned how Wikipedia is currently grappling with quality assurance in its articles. The bottom line seemed to be: How do we check our checkers, or do we even attempt to? Can we design a system that self-corrects and ensures the most accurate information rises to the top?

At the end of my presentation I told everyone to come see me at lunch to talk about the project. I almost didn’t have time to eat because so many people came up to offer their insights or say they might be able to help. Three software developers and one wiki expert were among those whose interest was piqued. No one seemed to doubt that our application could be built. Even more importantly, they all thought it should be built.

One thing everyone agreed on is that we must have some form of reputation system. If someone proves to be incapable of doing fact checking or simply peppers each file with their partisan links, they will have to be flagged for all to see. At the other end of the spectrum, someone who proves to be an effective, prolific fact checker needs to reap the rewards associated with their contributions.

In a larger sense, reputation is at the core of this project. Hopefully, bringing journalists and non-journalists together to innovate in the way fact checking is performed will raise the bar for accuracy and help smash the wall of suspicion that currently separates both camps.

Anyone else?

Craig Silverman is the Director of Verification for NewAssignment.Net, a volunteer positon. He introduces himself to NewAssignment.Net readers here.