Audience Engagement
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In Norway, four newsrooms are working together to produce and share fact-checks

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Faktisk is a collaborative fact-checking project between VG, Dagbladet, NRK and TV 2

Last autumn, VG and Dagbladet, two of Norway’s most-read tabloid newspapers, began exploring the possibility of collaborating on fact-checking.

In December 2016, a small team of journalists, developers and designers from the two organisations started working on the project, called Faktisk. Two more organisations came on board this spring – NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, and TV 2, the largest commercial television broadcaster in the country.

Faktisk, which launched officially in July, has been set up as an editorially independent, non-profit organisation that fact-checks claims made in public debates and on social media. Its team of eight, led by editor-in-chief Kristoffer Egeberg, come from its four founding media companies, although anyone can apply to join.

Fact-checks are published on Faktisk’s website, as well as through FacebookTwitter and the Norwegian national news agency NTB, which enables newspapers to re-use them by embedding them on their own websites.

“We need to focus on what builds trust, and fact-checking is the kind of journalism that builds trust,” Helje Solberg, chairman of Faktisk’s board, and editor of VGTV, told Journalism.co.uk.

“Faktisk is run as an open-source software that allows unlimited access for reuse and distribution of its structure and its content.”

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