Of course, well before any separate job of “fact-checker” existed, editors and reporters would have had their eyes out for errors — but it was around the turn of the 20th century, between the sensational yellow journalism of the 1890s and muckraking in the early 1900s, that the American journalism industry began to really focus on facts. The professionalization of the business included codifying ethics and creating professional organizations. And, as objective journalism caught on, ideals of accuracy and impartiality began to matter more than ever.
Publications in the first two decades of the 1900s did have operations intended to make them more accurate, like the “Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play” that was started by Ralph Pulitzer, son of Joseph Pulitzer, and Isaac White at the New York World in 1913. The bureau was focused on complaints, looking “to correct carelessness and to stamp out fakes and fakers.” They would keep track of who was making errors, to catch repeat offenders. At the time, the idea was termed a “novel departure” by an industry publication, but it still concentrated on reprimands and apologies rather than preventing those errors from making it to print.
So, while it’s always difficult to say what the absolute first instance of something was, especially given that fact-checking is an internal function that doesn’t get much publicity when it’s done well, TIME emerged as a leader when the magazine began hiring people specifically to check articles for accuracy before publication. They weren’t called fact-checkers at first. (Though, appropriately enough, there was a period during which Luce and Hadden had considered calling their new magazine Facts.) The New Yorker — long renowned for its checking process — only started publishing in 1925, and didn’t start rigorous checking until 1927, according to Ben Yagoda’s About Town, following the publication of an egregiously inaccurate profile of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Newsweek started in 1933.
Perhaps the earliest published use of the phrase “fact-checker” can be found in an ad for TIME in a 1938 issue of Colliers, which mentions the expansion of “its researchers and fact-checkers from ten to twenty-two.”
TIME’s first fact-checker was Nancy Ford. She’d worked at Woman’s Home Companion and in early 1923 was hired as a secretarial assistant as Luce and Hadden got their new publication started. Her job at first was to mark and clip interesting articles from newspapers for the magazine’s writers, but soon the task expanded to verifying basic dates, names and facts in completed TIME articles. Ford and her colleagues — all women — were encouraged to challenge the initially all-male staff of editors and writers, a must for the process to work. “The fun was that you could say what you thought,” she recalled in an oral history interview conducted in the 1950s, “and didn’t have to be respectful.”