In October 2024, the polling company Gallup released a survey containing this question: “In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, TV and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly?” Only 31% answered “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” down from 72% in the 1970s.
The true picture is likely even bleaker than the Gallup results suggest. Newspapers, TV and radio are typically staffed by professional journalists with years on the job, trained in properly sourcing and fact-checking their material. But newsrooms are shrinking, and local publications and programs are scarce and getting scarcer.
Today, we live in an era when people get information from a splintered amalgam of sources, many of which make no pretense of following journalistic standards. “Talking heads” are more ubiquitous than ever, with podcasters and influencers freely offering their two cents’ worth (and more!) on topics both slight and serious. Some social media platforms have publicly abdicated any responsibility for fact-checking. Information found on many websites is generated by “content mills” that may hire underqualified and dismally paid writers—or simply use artificial intelligence—to repackage what has already appeared elsewhere, possibly repeating errors or creating new ones. A lack of proofreading means that typos are common.
When the lines blur between sources of information, we’re left with, not surprisingly, an erosion of trust and an alarming conclusion: A society is in trouble when more than two-thirds of its members no longer trust the people whose job it is to tell them the truth. Yikes. So what’s the remedy? As a first step, we would like to “open the hood” to show you our process for reporting our stories. We don’t suggest that every media outlet should do everything exactly as we do, but we take our journalistic responsibilities very seriously, as a proud 103-year-old publication whose motto is “A trusted friend in a complicated world.”
To keep the car metaphor going, ride along as we share examples from some recent issues. You’ll see how we got the details we did, and how we checked and double-checked to make sure we got it all right.
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Understanding Reader’s Digest
I began working at Reader’s Digest in 1998 as a research editor, which is to say, as a fact-checker. Working to verify every fact on every page was an incredible training ground for people like me who wanted someday to write our own stories. After three years, I became a reporter and writer, and now I regularly write for the magazine on a freelance basis.
As we get started, it’s important to stress that Reader’s Digest is not a newspaper or a news channel. That means we can take our time to choose our topics and report, write, edit and fact-check our stories. Consider the obvious: The actual magazine is printed on paper, so if we make a mistake—which we are proud to say we rarely do—we can’t just go online and correct it. (That said, the website’s editors, who are part of a separate team, rely on trusted sources, engage in thorough editing and revisit their stories regularly to ensure they are accurate and up to date.)
While we don’t break news, what we do is tell stories. Whether we’re working on a hard-hitting National Interest report, a timely health feature or an intense Drama in Real Life tale of rescue and survival, what sets us apart is the narrative nature of our work. Our stories read like stories, and we strive to get inside the heads and hearts of the characters who appear in them. This presents an equally daunting set of reporting challenges. No matter what type of article we’re working on, we apply the same journalistic techniques and standards for accuracy.
Laying the groundwork
Last summer, I received an assignment to write about the crisis facing American physicians, who were reporting record levels of burnout and disillusionment within their profession. This became “What’s Ailing Our Doctors?” and was published in the September 2024 issue. I began by reading everything I could about physician dissatisfaction, then attended a conference devoted to doctors “taking back” their profession. Then I started reaching out to individuals to hear in their own words what was ailing them.
In interviews with medical professionals and other experts, I came to understand that a large part of the problem is the corporatization of medical care in the United States, under which physicians are overburdened with patients and with paperwork, and feel a loss of autonomy when nonphysician executives push harder and harder for profitability. I was getting the picture, but the human element was lacking. I needed someone whose personal story underscored the issue.
Through networking with conference attendees, I found the perfect interviewee, an emergency doctor named Viktoria Koskenoja. She told me about studying for her med school exams at the bedside of her mother who lay dying of cancer, about falling in love with emergency medicine, and about finding the perfect hospital to work in—until it was taken over by a private equity firm and she found herself compelled to quit before compromising her principles.
A second physician told me a similar story, but after our interview she called me back to ask that I not use the material, for fear of professional reprisals. We compromised by including her story but changing her name and removing the details that might make her identifiable. We seldom do this in our pages, but in this case we felt that the public-interest value of including her story outweighed our preference for using real names.
Getting the goods
Before I interview someone, for any topic, I develop a basic idea of how to structure the conversation, and I write up a long list of questions. My challenge is to getall the details that make for a good story, and to do so in just one or two sessions, given how busy everyone is. We especially want to be respectful of interviewees’ time since, unlike some media outlets, we never pay people for their stories or for lending us their expertise. Paying for an interview runs the risk of someone gilding the lily to make their story better and can give the appearance that people are telling us what we wantto hear.
Eliciting personal reflections and emotional reactions requires establishing a certain rapport with the interviewee—something you can’t get by emailing people a list of questions to type up answers to. I know an interview is going well when the subject tells me, “This is actually something I haven’t shared before.” That happened when, for the February 2025 issue, I wrote “A Sinking Feeling,” about an ocean lifeguard who saved the lives of a woman and her young daughter when they were trapped beneath a capsized boat.Much had already been written about the rescue. Suddenly, during our conversation, the lifeguard, Bob Selfridge, said to me, “And then the other part is, just ironically, I had been six months sober almost to the day that that rescue happened.”
This was interesting, but even more so when I gently asked him more about his alcoholism. He told me he’d been drinking to self-medicate his PTSD from a lifetime of rescue work. A baby had died in his arms (through no fault of his own), and he’d nearly drunk himself to death before entering rehab. Now, on the day of the rescue, six months sober, he was still on a knife’s edge. Suddenly our story’s hero was mortal, vulnerable and relatable, and the stakes of the rescue were higher than ever. A Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t have come up with a better backstory, and it was all true.
I make an audio recording of every interview I conduct and then transcribe it to share with the magazine’s team of fact-checkers. While we might lightly edit quotes for length and clarity—same with our humor submissions and reader stories for our Your True Stories roundups—we never change the meaning, make up quotes or add embellishments to help the story along.
Asking the experts
We will never state how something works without having consulted expert sources. The deeper we delve, the better a story becomes. For our June 2024 Drama in Real Life story, “When a Snake Fell from the Sky,” I wrote about a Texas woman named Peggy Jones who was unlucky enough to have a snake fall onto her from the clear blue sky while she was mowing grass on her tractor. It had been dropped by a hawk that had just caught it as prey. The snake wrapped itself around her arm and began striking at her face. Seconds later, the hawk arrived and put Jones through some even more hellish moments as it attempted to tear the snake off her forearm with its talons.
Peggy Jones is a wonderful person, and my gut told me she was completely trustworthy. However, even honest people can get details wrong when they’re traumatized, and a couple of points in her story worried me slightly. First was the idea that a snake, falling from the sky and hitting a human’s outstretched arm, would coil itself around the arm rather than just hit it, slide off and fall the rest of the way to the ground.
To find out whether this animal fact was possible, I contacted a snake expert from Middle Tennessee State University, who had no doubts about Jones’s assertion, emphasizing that the coiling response would be similar to the way falling humans grasp at whatever they can.
Fair enough. But the other point I worried about was that the hawk made several passes and multiple grabs at the snake. Red-tailed hawks are skittish around people, so I found it surprising to think that one would brave a chugging tractor and a screaming, flailing woman just to get to a snake.
I took this concern to a biologist at Cornell University. “It’s conceivable this is a young bird, hatched this year and still trying to figure out how to do things,” he told me. Such a bird, he said, would be loath to surrender a meal as large as the snake. Young hawks, he said, “have to learn how to catch stuff and kill it without getting hurt and letting it get away.” And that’s not easy to do.
“Juveniles,” he added, “get into all kinds of troubles.”
Not only had the experts helped to corroborate Jones’s testimony, but their perspective had also given both our snake and our hawk relatable dimensions that made them characters in the story: the snake scared and hanging on for dear life, the hawk a bumbling adolescent making dumb decisions. Rather than ruining the story, chasing down my doubts had made it better.
Checking and balancing
After I submit an article draft, editors and fact-checkers make sure that what I’ve written is clear, accurate and fair. For our National Interest stories, which tackle issues of the day, and other stories that hinge on statistics, I get challenged by fact-checkers—who go over each article line by line.
For example, after I’d submitted an article for the June 2023 issue about the trucking industry, called “How We Fail Our Truckers,” we spent hours consulting multiple sources to confirm whether truck driving accounted for about 8% of jobs in every state, as an industry spokesperson had told me. Preferring to use no statistic rather than one we couldn’t confirm, we ended up simply writing this: “For many, the job provides a stable income, often with health care and retirement benefits.”
It’s important to note that our fact-checkers don’t just do this with original articles assigned to writers by Reader’s Digest editors. They recheck and update articles we’re reprinting, many from venerable publications. Editors not only make sure that my words are clear and that the story flows; they also weigh in to play devil’s advocate or to make sure both sides of an issue are given a fair shake. “Surely there’s an argument to be made in favor of the role of private equity in health care,” an editor prompted me upon seeing the first draft of my article about doctors. “Maybe it makes the system more efficient or provides services in remote areas. Let’s hear more from that point of view.” That was good guidance. Taking my editor’s advice and airing the opposing argument grounded the article in the nuanced, sometimes messy, reality of how the world works.
Reader’s Digest also has attorneys who review articles that touch on legal matters to make sure that we’re being fair in how we present both sides of any argument and, of course, to ensure that we haven’t committed libel or slander. Telling the truth isn’t always fun. Whenever we point out shortcomings supported by our reporting, we get on the phone with the party in question and share with them the details of what we’re preparing to publish. These conversations are usually collegial, but sometimes they can be tense and occasionally contentious. But the counterpoints have a place in the article, and we try to give fair airing to them. For example: “A spokesperson for XYZ hospital says the facility’s quality of care is confirmed by various ratings organizations despite ‘national challenges, like staffing shortages, that are affecting hospitals across the country.’ ”
Enjoying the final product
We hope you’ve enjoyed this ride-along. When you add it all up, what we do in the name of responsible journalism may sound simplistic: Hear directly from people, don’t make up quotes, do your homework, consult experts, check facts, let the other side make its argument. No duh, right? But in an era of AI, big data, and flashy technological solutions to every “business problem,” some might find these simple shoe-leather measures quaint.
At Reader’s Digest, as with many other excellent publications, we don’t. We find taking our time and going through the process is critical for maintaining the trust of you, our readers. It’s worked for us in the past, and it will continue to work for us. You have our sincere thanks for placing your trust in us.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Gallup: “Americans’ Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low”
- HubSpot: “Content Mills Don‘t Work—Here’s Why”
- The Sandpaper.net: “Selfridge Awarded Prestigious Coast Guard Gold Medal for Heroism”
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