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Home Trine Tsouderos on This Week in Virology: When do you fact-check article content with sources?

Trine Tsouderos on This Week in Virology: When do you fact-check article content with sources?

submitted by ccondayan on September 22, 2011
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Tags: Chicago Tribune , ICAAC , Journalism , Trine Tsouderos , TWiV
Source: blogs.plos.org
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The PLoS blog "Take as Directed" has started an interesting discussion based on science journalism and fact checking that was generated by the popular science podcast This Week in Virology that was streamed live at ASM's International Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in Chicago.

During the podcast, Trine Tsouderos, Science/Medical journalist for the Chicago Tribune, acknowledged "her practice of sometimes running quotes, paragraphs, and even full articles past scientists she’s interviewed for fact-checking purposes" which is often perceived as bad form in journalism circles.

Based on this revelation the blog's author David Kroll asks the question, "how do you negotiate this slope of prospectively sharing article content with scientist sources?"

The result is a cascade of comments about the practice.

Also, of interest is Trine Tsouderos' take on comments and why she is against having a comment section for her articles. She feels they don't really ad to her articles one way or another.

Click source to read the blog post and the 86 and counting comments.

Here's the video:














 
 

Comments (2)

  1. avatar Vincent Racaniello makes this comment

    Thu Sep 22 15:40:50 2011

    I think it's a great idea to check facts in science-related stories; I cannot understand why the writers are so opposed to this practice. I checked Rebecca Skloot's 'Immortal Life' in this way and I am sure she is grateful. I've also done it for Trine, as we reveal in TWiV 149.

  2. avatar Chris Condayan makes this comment

    Thu Sep 22 15:49:07 2011

    I think the issue is that if you fact check with the author of the study you are writing about you risk getting a biased assessment. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't fact check it with an independent source.

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