Per one of my favorite podcasts, WNYC’s On the Media, journalists are finding it increasingly more difficult to check facts at a pace that keeps up with modern news coverage.  To be successful, they need dedicated fact checkers.   Seem familiar yet?

Journalists depend on these fact checkers to keep them out of trouble.  And fact checkers need to have their own skill sets, allowing them to focus on fact checking.  Fact checkers have to be creative and use various tricks, like only following trustworthy people on Twitter and speaking different languages to understand the broader picture.  How about now, seem familiar?

Okay, try this:  Craig Silverman, founder of Regret the Error, a media error reporting blog, said “typically people only notice fact checkers if some terrible mistake has been made”.  Now it seems familiar, right?

The audience of fact checkers or software testers has no idea how many errors were found before it was released.  They only know what wasn’t found. 

Sometimes I have a revenge fantasy that goes something like this:

If a user finds a bug and says, “that’s so obvious, why didn’t they catch this”, their software will immediately revert back to the untested version. 

…Maybe some tester love will start to flow then.