Fact Checking Resources

This is your warning not to use Wikipedia as a primary source. Too many reporters have been busted for using bad info from Wikipedia. I could show you examples, but I trust you only need to be warned…

“Reports, data and analyses of NIH research and development activities.” The National Institutes of health runs many, many research programs on public health. This is a good place to go to start…

It’s true. Our congressmen and women are getting into the social media space. The list is pretty accurate, but as it’s a wiki, it carries the same caveats as all wiki sites: verify the info with…

Pure data, mapping information and other useful demographic info is collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Great for understanding the big picture of your city, county, state and nation.

There are thousands of listservs (email discussion lists) that aren’t indexed by Google. This catalog is constantly updated with new public listservs. It’s a good place to dig for experts,…

Need to search through thousands of listserv messages? Do it through email with this cheatsheet.

This is a great list developed by PR guy Peter Shankman. If you want to find an interviewee but don’t know where to turn, try posting a message to this email list. Be sure to fully vet the person who…

This a fantastic index of science and environment-related datasets produced by the U.S. government. Checkout DataFerrett (linked on page), which is the data extraction tool. It’s not easy to use, but…

This extremely useful index allows you to drill down to free data sources from your state, county and locality.

Lots of state and local governments are provide data not just in .csv formats but also in RSS, XML and KML (spatial data, otherwise known as geodata for mapping). This is one example.