Enlarge image
Photo: Marcus Wiechmann / DER SPIEGEL
How do the ingredients of sun creams work?
How do the federal states deal with meteorite and fossil finds?
What do we know about Long Covid?
And how do we find evidence of tax evasion and corruption in 70 million leaked documents?
Welcome to the everyday life of the SPIEGEL documentary!
Our department is trained to find an answer to almost every question.
With more than 50 colleagues, we support the SPIEGEL editorial team - providing them with important information at the beginning of a research and checking the finished articles before publication.
No other media company in Germany has such a well-equipped team of fact checkers.
The specialty is the biggest pound of the »doc«, as we are called in-house: More than 50 lawyers, historians and Islamic scholars, sinologists, sociologists, physicians and geologists work here, many of whom have doctorates.
In addition to the common Western European languages, some also speak Russian, Albanian, Arabic or Persian.
2000 shelf meters of Leitz files, books, magazines
In our digital press archive alone, we have stored more than 100 million documents since the mid-1990s;
Around 100,000 articles are added every week, and over 200 publications are regularly evaluated.
In addition, we have archived more than 2000 meters of shelves of Leitz files, books, magazines and microfiches.
In addition to a large number of subject-specific databases, the SPIEGEL archive is an indispensable - and often enough exclusive - source for research.
The so-called verification of articles is our main task: A large part of the articles written for the digital offer SPIEGEL + and for the printed SPIEGEL go over our tables, so they are "doctored" in order to remain in the conversation with colleagues. We often check the texts sentence by sentence for factual correctness and plausibility and put sensitive images and graphics to the test. This starts with the spelling of proper names and goes through numbers, biographical information and the correct interpretation of studies to the classification of historical developments.
In a detailed handover talk, the documentary and author go through the text together, discuss objections, doubts and problematic passages and correct errors. These conversations are often not free from tension: because the documentary is perhaps the editor's sharpest critic. This has been wanted since the founding of SPIEGEL - the aim is to publish articles that are as free of errors as possible and thus to secure the journalistic credibility of SPIEGEL. The SPIEGEL statute of 1949, in which the editorial staff laid down the basics of their work, already stated: "In cases of doubt, it is better to forego information than to run the risk of incorrect reporting."
SPIEGEL author Arno Frank once described his experience with the SPIEGEL documentary in a column in the »taz« as follows: To editors, being given a doctor feels like »like having tax auditors
and
exterminators in the house - with a colonoscopy at the same time« .
But then you feel "fantastic".
The reason for Frank's tongue-in-cheek comparison, however, was probably the darkest chapter in the history of SPIEGEL: the fraud scandal surrounding reporter Claas Relotius.
In December 2018, SPIEGEL revealed that Relotius had simply invented most of its often award-winning pieces and was able to bypass the company's multi-level control systems.
In-depth examination based on the sampling principle
It was not only the worst case scenario for our department. In response to this, the editorial team and documentation have revised the journalistic and editorial standards and set them down in a guide. The specialist principle now also applies to the verification of reports from the reporter department: Depending on the topic, each text is checked by the in-house specialist if possible. This has always been the case for all other departments. Before the scandal, however, the reports from today's reporter department were essentially verified by one and the same documentary, a generalist.
In addition, we regularly select a freshly published text at random and subject it to an in-depth examination by an independent colleague: In this context, particularly those passages are critically examined where we can and must normally rely on a thorough research by the author.
If necessary, we also contact photographers or protagonists - the latter in particular is otherwise a taboo and may only be done in consultation with the author.
Above all, however, since Relotius we have repeatedly and intensively discussed how we work, which things we handle differently within the department and why, how we deal with problems and which mistakes we make.
The focus is always on how we can learn from it together.
The time pressure has increased, the claim remains
Our work has changed as a result of the merging of print and online editors at SPIEGEL;
The time pressure has increased, which is an enormous challenge for us.
Because everyone knows: In order to be able to examine facts appropriately, you need a minimum of time.
We try to be more agile;
sometimes we can just do a quick check or review the main thesis.
However, our attitude towards work has remained the same as when our department was founded: We are the ones in the background who question everything and make sure that nothing goes wrong.
And those who are most happy when in the end everything is waterproof and, if necessary, also stands up in court.
So if the editorial team can shine.