It looks like the word is getting out. On Sunday TechtTrotter was mentioned in an article published by one of India’s largest daily newspapers, the Deccan Chronicle. According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Chronicle has a circulation of over 1.3 million copies of their english-language.

In a story about changing job options for graduates of journalism programs, I was named along with Ankita Rao, a graduate of the University of Florida who will be taking a volunteer post in Northern India. We are both eschewing the traditional  post-graduation career path. You can read the story called “Catch A Falling Star This Year” here.

I was pleased to receive the free publicity, but the story itself was riddled with factual inaccuracies. Because a journalist lives and dies by his credibility, it’s worth taking a second to highlight some of the many mistakes that were injected into the story.

• The story misquotes me in direct citation. The author made a up a quote that sounded good. Here’s what author Asha Sachdev published:

“I created a journalistic project called TechTrotter (techtrotter. org) and it will take me travelling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa, India and to the Philippines!” Chima writes to Rao.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Great post. You and I are embarking on similar journeys after the completion of the journalism degree. I will be traveling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa and the Philippines as part of a journalistic project I created called TechTrotter. Check it out; www.techtrotter.org.”

You can see the original article and my comments here.

While the substance is the same, using a direct quote means the speaker said it exactly as it appears. Clearly some creativity went into making me sound more Indian.

• The story says that Ankita Rao is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School. In fact, there is a picture of Rao on the SAJA Forum main page with a caption indicating she studied at the University of Florida. Another easy one to avoid.

• The story says that I am a woman, but the page “About TechTrotter” has a picture of me with a pretty convincing goatee. Had Sachdev visited TechTrotter before writing about it, this also might have been avoided. A quick look at the Google Analytics June reports indicates that I have not had a single visitor from India, which means that Sachdev likely wrote about my blog without knowing whether it actually exists.

So, you might be asking yourself, why all the fuss? Because it’s sloppy reporting and it could only be accomplished with the aid of technology. Pulling quotes from blog comments is a legitimate way to supplement more traditional forms of reporting, such as phone calls, emails or face-to-face conversations (gasp), but it shouldn’t be a substitute for journalistic legwork. The reporters job is to get the facts right the first time, but mistakes will eventually slip through the cracks. Even with the best editor, there is no avoiding it.

This whole experience got me thinking about an idea I’ve had for a while now; a net-based fact checking service for blogs that might alleviate problems like these. Let’s call the product Correct.ly.

Correct.ly would be a subscription-based fact checking service for bloggers and small publications that create original material.  The Correct.ly team would be a decentralized network of freelance reporters and editors who contact named sources or double check statistics before an article gets a final stamp of approval. Bloggers could chose to post and flag their stories for follow-up with the Correc.ly team, or they could allow Correct.ly to verify all information before a story goes out. Correctly would have a tiered payment system based on the number of posts created each day and the a guaranteed turnaround time of 60 minutes or less.

In a competitive news environment, being the first to break a story sometimes means getting the word out minutes before the other guys do. The important details may be right, but often,  the story comes out half-baked. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has been talking about this style of “process journalism” a lot lately.  Correct.ly would not impede the publication of a breaking story, but it would clearly show readers when the facts have yet to be verified.

As a journalist,  I am still grappling to understand the inner workings of Open Calais, a new service by Reuters, but I believe it could provide the technological backbone of a fact checking service like Correct.ly. By extracting and organizing semantic data in blog posts, Open Calais tags information in stories and creates relationships based on the facts and people mentioned, according to the Web site. While computers are great at aiding reporters, a technological solution is still a long way off. A computer program can easily establish relationships based on conditional statements like “If:Then,” but journalists are still needed to make sense of nuanced relationships between people that are unclear to an algorithm.

I also understand that important stories often rely on high-level sources whose jobs or even safety may be compromised by speaking  on the record.  However, given the nature of the blogosphere, this is rarely the case. One way to get ensure that unnamed sources remain protected and Web sites remain reliable would be to assign grades to sites. After each story is submitted, a grade  would be assigned by Correct.ly  based on the number and severity of factual errors.  The more errors the fact checkers uncover, the lower the overall score of the publication and vice versa.

A major media organization such as the New York Times has the financial resources and the people necessary to start Correct.ly today. Any mainstream publication worth its salt has a fact checking department already in place. Hiring more fact checkers on a freelance basis and renting them out would be a great way to generate revenue and take advantage of the amount of content on the blogosphere. Seeing how many reporters and editors are being fired from papers these days, I am confident it would not be hard to find more fact checkers if the service picks up. Additionally, a savvy organization could incorporate Correct.ly blogs into their content network, thereby creating more advertising inventory to sell to marketers. Correct.ly could be a very powerful go-between linking mainstream media and the blogosphere in a way where both benefit.

I’m thankful for a little free publicity and incompetent reporting for giving me a chance to explore this idea in print. In any case, Correct.ly is an idea I have been kicking around for a while and I would love to know what people think.