Journalist Wudan Yan on the importance of fact-checking as ‘peer review’

This week's guest on the Nieman Storyboard podcast, journalist Wudan Yan, is founder of the fact-checking agency Factual, which provides fact-checking services for journalists, authors, and nonprofits. Writing for her newsletter, she recently made the case that fact-checking itself needs to evolve to meet the moment, so we talked about how journalists can make the most of the process in their own work. 

“ My true fear is that people are just going to become desensitized to the amount of fake information that's out there and not care,” Yan told me. But “as long as people care and value accuracy, I think fact-checking has a place, I think journalism has a place.” 

Yan was pursuing a doctoral degree in cancer biology when she decided to make the jump into journalism, starting as a fact-checker for publications including the science magazine Nautilus. She eventually moved into reporting, developing an understanding for what it meant to tell science and environmental stories through a narrative lens. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, High Country News, MIT Technology Review, The New York Times, and Popular Mechanics, among other publications. 

Reading list: Authors, books, essays, and publications mentioned

• Wudan Yan's website
• Factual agency 
• Nautilus Magazine 
• “The Vice of Spice: Confronting Lead-Tainted Turmeric" (Wudan Yan, Undark, 2023)
• UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowships 
• Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• “The traditional ways of thinking about fact-checking aren’t enough anymore” (Wudan Yan, 2026)
• “We need fact-checkers more than ever. Here's how to work with one.” (Kim Cross, Nieman Storyboard 2025)

Show Credits

Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova

Nieman Foundation curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy

Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.