Pismo. To foster the best practice fact-checking in Polish media
- Priority Area Boosting Fact-checking Activities in Europe
- Funding Round / Action Types 4th Funding Round – Scale-up Projects
- Year 2023, 2024
- Country Poland
- Project Status Completed
Pismo. Magazyn opinii is a unique non profit media project run by the Pismo Foundation, with a mission to shape current and future leaders of Polish social, political and cultural life. It restores the faith in in-depth, reliable, non-partisan, high-quality journalism working for the public purpose.
Pismo is a monthly magazine distinctive in the Polish media market, with its focus on the long read, carefully edited content avoiding daily political or casual sensations, published in paper, digital and audio formats. It has already been recognised with major national and international awards, the independent media research and industry associations, and has been praised for its innovative content formats. Since a thorough fact-checking of all the content published is not a common practice among media in Poland, we believe that the process and resources deployed by Pismo stand as a best practice and an important reference point for the other Polish editorial teams.
The project responds to the challenges faced by democracy and independent media in Poland and to the decline of trust in media and their independence of undue political influences, through fostering and promoting good fact-checking practices. It will allow Pismo to run and improve the quality of our fact-checking process, covering the remuneration of a full-time fact-checker employed by Pismo, the external freelance fact-checkers/editors and external reviewers. In addition, it will run a campaign promoting the best practice methods of fact-checking among Pismo readers and a wider audience. The key impact of this effort comes from offering Polish thought and opinion leaders access to in-depth, high-quality, nonpartisan, fact-checked content that will help them to critically assess information accessed through different media and will make them more resistant to autocracy and populism.