Chapter2: Verification Fundamentals: Rules to Live By Steve Buttry is Digital Transformation Editor for Digital First Media. He has been an editor, reporter and writing coach for seven U.S. newspapers and had leadership roles at TBD.com and the American Press Institute. He has led more than 40 ethics seminars, workshops and webinars around the world. He was named Editor of the Year1 in 2010 by Editor & Publisher magazine. Buttry has pursued his 42-year journalism career across the United States and Canada and in Ireland, Venezuela, Mexico, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Siberia, France and Italy. He blogs at stevebuttry.wordpress.com2 and tweets via @stevebuttry3. In 1996, I did a project on an American high school girls basketball team that had won the Iowa state championship 25 years earlier4. I interviewed all 12 members of the Farragut team, as well as the star and coach of Mediapolis, the team Farragut beat for the championship. I asked them all how Farragut won the game. They gave different, often vivid, accounts of the same story: Mediapolis star Barb Wischmeier, who was 6 feet tall, scored easily on the shorter Farragut girls early in the game, and Mediapolis took the lead. The Farragut coach sent Tanya Bopp, who was barely 5 feet, into the game to guard Wischmeier. Bopp drew several charging fouls (some remembered specifically that it was three or four fouls) on the larger girl, who became flustered and less aggressive. Farragut came back to win the game. I didn’t question these consistent memories in my reporting, but learned almost by accident that they were exaggerated. One of the girls loaned me a video of the game. I watched the whole game, looking for details that would help my story. I wasn’t challenging anyone’s memory, but when I finished the tape, I thought I must have missed something. So I watched it again. Tiny Tanya Bopp drew only one foul on the larger girl. It did fluster the Mediapolis star and was the turning point of the game, but it happened only once. All those firsthand accounts I had heard were inaccurate, fueled by the emotions (joy or anguish) of an important moment in their lives, and shaped by a legend that grew from the game. The legend - and the opportunity to honor it by debunking it - gave me a great narrative thread for my article5 but also taught me a lesson in verification: Don’t trust even honest 15