KSJ@MIT Fact-Checking Workshop

Brooke Borel is a journalist and author specializing in science and technology. She’s the articles editor at Undark, an independent digital magazine devoted to coverage of science in the public interest, and has written for Popular Science, BuzzFeed News, the Guardian, TheAtlantic.com, Scientific American, Medium’s OneZero, FiveThirtyEight, Slate, and other publications. The Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have funded her work. She teaches writing workshops at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and speaks on journalism and fact-checking nationally and internationally. In 2019 her Scientific American article “Clicks, Lies and Videotape” received the American Society for Journalists and Authors award for outstanding science or Technology article, and she was a finalist in the National Academies Communication Awards. Her work has been anthologized in What Future. Her books are Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World and The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, both from the University of Chicago Press.

Patti Wolter joined the Medill faculty in the spring of 2002 and was named the Helen Gurley Brown Magazine Professor in 2018. Prior to joining the faculty, she spent 12 years in senior staff magazine jobs in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, including serving in the managing editor and acting editor positions at Mother Jones magazine and overseeing the award-winning health investigations team at Self magazine. Her freelance writing on women’s health and nutrition has appeared in a range of publications, and she continues to work as an editorial consultant for various print and online outlets. Wolter’s teaching focuses on the magazine industry, fact-checking, science writing and narrative, especially in relationship to feature writing and multimedia storytelling. She teaches courses in magazine editing, feature writing, health and science reporting, and narrative structure for undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to her regular teaching, Wolter has designed and implemented fact-checking curricula across Medill classes and programs and regularly guest lectures on the topic. For Northwestern’s Graduate School, Wolter is part of the team that developed a writing-for-consumer-audiences class for STEM+ Ph.D. students and serves as the lead lecturer for the course, now in its fifth year. Wolter also gives lectures and runs workshops for scientists on how to communicate with media and to develop skills for sharing their findings to lay audiences.

Jane Roberts is the deputy editor of Undark Magazine. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned a B.A. in journalism and economics, with a minor in environmental studies. Before coming to Undark, Jane interned with the wealth team at Forbes, where she valued and wrote about some of the country’s richest billionaires. She joined Undark in 2016 and has since developed its widely respected fact-checking program.

Ashley Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He previously spent eight years as an editor and reporter at Physics Today magazine and cofounded the science news blog HBSciU. Ashley was a 2015-16 Knight Science Journalism fellow and is a member of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Ashley has a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL.

Brad Scriber is the deputy research director for National Geographic magazine, where he helps ensure the accuracy of the magazine’s worldwide reporting. During his nearly fifteen years on staff at the magazine, he has fact-checked hundreds of thousands of words and helped the magazine maintain its commitment to accuracy even as the pace of magazine journalism has accelerated. He was a Knight Science Journalism Energy and Climate Boot Camp Fellow, and has spoken about fact-checking in science writing at meetings organized by the National Association of Science Writers and the Poynter Institute. He holds a master’s degree in geography from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining National Geographic, he did definitive research on the extent of inaccuracies in credit reports that helped reshape federal credit reporting laws.