The day I became a fact-checker at The New Yorker, I received one set of red pencils and one set of No. 2 pencils. [FC: There used to be a training period before the pencils.] [[VH: O.K. for “the day I became a fact-checker” to designate end of training period?]]

The red pencils were for underlining passages on page proofs of articles that might contain checkable facts. It was not always obvious what to underline. Sometimes a phrase would contain hidden facts, as in “Jane’s youngest son.” You’d have to check maternity and birth order, but you’d also have to confirm that Jane had at least three sons for one to be considered “youngest.” [FC: Wouldn’t the magazine have used her surname?] [[VH: Make it “Doe’s youngest son.”]]

The No. 2’s came next. With them you would draw strike marks through words — and sometimes individual letters — that were confirmed with the help of reference books from the magazine’s library, including Merriam-Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Burke’s Peerage. [FC: Actual title is Burke’s Peerage and Gentry.] Not infrequently, these imposing-looking books were as wacko as anything now on Wikipedia, as many of them made “facts” of off-the-wall data that hardly seemed to be proper objects of empirical study. (The Social Register, which gave the pedigrees of socialites, comes to mind.)

Fact-checkers also consulted periodicals. The department subscribed to virtually everything and kept newspapers archived on microfilm. Cautionary tales circulated about errors that originated in The New York Times or The Washington Post, only to be replicated and memorialized forever by lazy magazine fact-checkers relying on single news stories. Proper protocol was to consult microfilm of the paper but then to check the next few days’ papers, also on microfilm, on the chance that a correction had been published. This was labor intensive, especially when there seemed to be bigger conceptual fish to fry in complex articles about, say, the O. J. Simpson defense.