Fact-Checking Policy

What we mean by fact-checking

Fact-checking at AKRON SCORE is not a separate department that inspects finished articles. It is a discipline built into how every story is reported, from the first claim to the published headline. This page describes that discipline: how we test a claim against primary sources, how we handle the pressure of a breaking story, and what we do when a check comes back uncertain. We publish it because a reader is entitled to know not just what we concluded but how.

The core rule is simple to state and hard to keep under deadline: we publish what we can verify, we attribute what we cannot, and we do not present a guess as a fact. Everything below is machinery in service of that rule.

Primary sources first

A claim is only as good as its source, and the best source is the original one. Before we report a figure, a quote or an event, we try to reach the document underneath it: the official filing rather than the press release about it, the full transcript rather than the clipped quote, the dataset rather than the chart someone drew from it, the ruling rather than a lawyer’s summary of it. Where we can show that source to readers, we link to it, so you can check our reading against the original.

Second-hand claims are treated as leads, not facts. When another outlet reports something we have not confirmed ourselves, we say who reported it and we do not adopt it as our own until we have checked it. A claim that circulates widely is not thereby true; volume is not verification, and a rumour repeated by many accounts is still a rumour.

Verifying a breaking claim

Breaking news is where fact-checking is hardest and matters most, because the incentive to publish the biggest version first is strongest exactly when the facts are least settled. Our response is a set of habits. We confirm an event with more than one independent source before we state it as fact. We are sceptical of dramatic early numbers, which are almost always revised. We check that a photo or video actually shows what it claims, when and where it claims, before we build a story on it, because old and mislabelled footage spreads fastest during a crisis.

Until a claim clears that bar, we either hold it or we report it honestly as unconfirmed, naming who is asserting it and noting what we have not yet been able to check. Marking a story as developing is not an admission of weakness. It is an accurate description of what a breaking story is, and it is fairer to the reader than false certainty.

Wire copy and syndicated material

Some of what appears on a general-news site originates with news agencies and other providers rather than with our own reporters. We do not treat wire copy as automatically verified simply because it carries an agency’s name. Where we publish or build on syndicated material, we apply the same scrutiny we would to our own: we check names, figures and dates against the primary record where we can, we watch for claims that have moved on since the wire item was filed, and we make clear where reporting came from.

Wire discipline also means respecting embargoes and provenance, not stripping an agency’s caveats to make a story sound firmer than the agency itself was willing to make it. If an agency hedged a claim, we keep the hedge. Removing a qualifier to sharpen a headline is a way of introducing an error, and we treat it as one.

Quotes, numbers and images

Quotes are reproduced accurately and in context. We do not tidy a quote into saying something the speaker did not mean, and we do not crop a sentence so that its second half, which changed everything, disappears. Where a quote is translated, we say so, because translation is interpretation.

Numbers get particular attention because they persuade. We check a figure against its source, we distinguish a total from a rate and a projection from a result, and we are wary of statistics that arrive pre-packaged to prove a point, especially without a methodology behind them. Images and video are checked for origin and date before use, and we do not present illustrative or archive footage as if it were from the event in the story.

When a check is uncertain, and when we are wrong

Sometimes the honest finding is that we cannot confirm a claim. In that case we say so rather than round the uncertainty up to a fact or down to a dismissal. We would rather publish a smaller, solid story than a larger one held together by things we could not stand behind. If verifying a claim would take another hour and the claim is not safety-critical, the hour is usually worth it.

When we get a fact wrong despite all of this, we fix it openly. The story is corrected at its own address with a dated note, the error is labelled honestly, and where it travelled we chase it. That process is set out in full in our corrections policy, and the wider rules on sourcing and fairness are in our editorial standards. If you can show us that something we published does not hold up, write to support@akronscore.org with the link and the source, and we will check it properly.

Last updated: August 2026