More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed,

More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed, and (as for jwecker) focused on hard-to-verify matters. I asked the fact-checker about the process, and she said that the job had gotten much easier, since they could now check most facts using the web. Think of how difficult the New Yorker's fact checking was before the web! The process of fact-checking goes back to the early days of the New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. James Thurber wrote (in "The Years With Ross") of "Ross's later intense dedication to precision. He studied the New York Telephone Company's system of verifying names and numbers in its directories ... He found out about the Saturday Evening Post's checking department, which he said consisted of seven women who checked in turn every fact, name, and date. ... His checking department became famous, in the trade, for a precision that sometimes leaned over backward. ... Ross's checkers once informed Mencken that he couldn't have eaten dinner at a certain European restaurant he had mentioned in one of his New Yorker articles, because there wasn't any restaurant at the address he had given. Mencken brought home a menu with him to prove that he was right, but he was pleased rather than annoyed. 'Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,' he said."