The honest starting point for a page about verification is to verify the thing we most wanted to believe about ourselves. The belief was: "nobody in Nebraska is doing this."
That is false, and here are the people doing it.
| Who | What they do |
|---|---|
| Flatwater Free Press | Nebraska's independent nonprofit newsroom, launched 2021. Investigations and data-driven projects. Under the Nebraska Journalism Trust. |
| Nebraska Examiner | Statewide nonprofit newsroom. Free access, political and investigative coverage. |
| Nebraska Documenters | The closest thing to this by far. Nebraska Journalism Trust with Civic Nebraska. Trains and pays community members to attend under-covered public meetings and publish fact-checked notes. Relaunched in Omaha January 2024; 63 documenters covered 180 meetings in its first year. |
| Common Cause Nebraska | Disclosure and transparency work. |
| NADC | The state's own campaign finance and lobbying disclosure system. A primary source this site uses. |
If you are in Nebraska and want to do this work with training, support and pay, go look at Documenters before you look at us. They are organized, funded, and they already exist. That sentence costs us something to write and it is still the right sentence.
What we could not find was a free, one-person, non-advocacy help desk where a resident types a question and gets a sourced answer or an honest "not built yet" — with its own corrections published on the page. That is a narrower claim than "first," and it is the one we can defend. If you know of one, tell us and this table gets longer.
That box is the method, demonstrated before it is explained. We had a flattering belief. We checked it. It failed. We published the failure at the top of the page instead of the bottom. Everything below is just how to do that on purpose.
Who this is for
- Somebody in a state where nobody is doing this — after you have actually checked, which we just showed you how to get wrong
- Somebody with one issue they care about and no idea how to check it
- Somebody who has been told "do your own research" and found that nobody explains what that actually means
You do not need: a journalism degree, a law degree, a budget, a staff, a newsroom, or permission.
You do need: the willingness to publish that you were wrong.
The one rule everything else serves
Do not publish the adjective.
Publishable:
Not publishable:
The first cannot be sued, "fact-checked," or dismissed as partisan. The second lets a hostile reader throw away everything else on your page.
The timeline is more damning than the insult. Every time. That is not a moral position — it is a tactical one. It happens to also be the honest one.
The five steps
This ran end to end on 2026-09-09 on a Nebraska medical cannabis story. Each step shows what it produced that day.
Capture the claim — and admit what capture is
You heard something. A video, a neighbor, a news segment, a post. Write down what was claimed, where it came from, and the date. That is all step 1 is.
The thing nobody tells you: if a claim came through an automated transcript or an AI summary, the proper nouns are the least reliable part of it. Names of people, cases, and organizations get mangled constantly. Numbers usually survive.
That summary was fluent, organized, and confident. It was also wrong about both names.
Build a scoreboard before you write one sentence
Do not start writing the page. List every checkable claim in a table and give each a verdict:
| Verdict | Means |
|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | Found it in a primary source |
| WRONG | Primary source says otherwise |
| MISLEADING | Technically true, materially incomplete |
| COULD NOT VERIFY | I looked and did not find it |
That last row is the most important thing on this page.
Had we written "FALSE," we would have published an error while feeling rigorous. The rule saved us from ourselves.
Write the scoreboard first, because once you have written a narrative, errors survive inside good prose. Nobody re-checks a sentence that flows well.
Go to the primary source — not the coverage of it
Primary means the thing itself: the court opinion, the bill text, the agency's own page, the filing, the roll call. Secondary means somebody's description of it.
Secondary sources are fine for quotes and reactions. They are not fine for facts.
The opinion also contained two concurrences nobody reported and exact per-person signature counts no article printed.
Where primary sources live — all free
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Court opinions | Your state judicial branch site; most publish free |
| Bills, amendments, votes | Your state legislature's site |
| Debate summaries | Many legislatures publish their own news service |
| Rules, meetings, deadlines | The agency's own .gov site |
| Federal campaign money | OpenFEC — free API |
| Congressional votes | Congress.gov, House Clerk XML, Senate XML, VoteView |
| State campaign money | Your state's ethics or disclosure commission |
| Court dockets | Call the clerk of court. It costs nothing. |
You almost never need to pay. One state's online case search wanted $17. The clerk's phone number was free, and so was the public terminal in the courthouse lobby.
Ask the people you name — before you need to
This is the step that separates a record from an argument, and almost nobody does it.
If your page names an official, email that office. Offer them the chance to explain or correct.
- Say who you are in one honest sentence. Not press credentials — "I'm a resident and I publish a civics site that cites every claim."
- Say exactly what your page says about them, including how it is framed.
- Ask questions answerable with a fact or a "no." Never ask why. "Why did you kill this bill" gets a non-answer. "Do you intend to reintroduce it" gets a yes or no.
- Offer a correction and mean it. "Tell me which item is wrong and what the correct source is, and I will fix it and date-stamp the correction."
- Tell each side you asked the other. That is what makes it a record instead of an ambush.
- Ask the side you would be assumed to favor, too. If the check only fires in one direction, it is not a check — it is a campaign.
Get the address from the official source, never from a search summary. A wrong address means you believe you asked when you didn't.
| Who | Asked | Replied | What they said |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sen. ____ | 2026-09-09 | — | No response as of 2026-09-__ |
Publish — including what you still don't know
Every page ends with what it does not contain. Not as an apology — as a feature.
That box is the most useful thing on the page.
Three things every page carries:
- A date on every claim. Undated facts rot silently.
- A "homework still owed" section. What you haven't checked, and why.
- A correction log. When you get something wrong, fix it in place, dated, with the old version described. Never quietly edit.
The failure modes we actually hit
Not hypotheticals. All of these happened in one day, to us.
| What happened | The rule that came out of it |
|---|---|
| An AI summary named the wrong man as plaintiff in a case captioned after him | Check every proper noun. Numbers survive transcription; names don't. |
| Every news outlet reported the panel composition wrong, and we repeated it | Press is not primary. Pull the document. |
| We nearly called a true claim "false" because we couldn't find the source | COULD NOT VERIFY ≠ WRONG. Never print them the same way. |
| Our own checklist said a phase was unfinished; it had been done for days | A status document is a claim. Verify it like any other. |
| Our search script errored on a missing file and printed "ABSENT" as a finding | A tool that cannot see must say so. "I could not reach it" is not "it isn't there." |
| A file upload showed a 100% progress bar, twice, and never wrote | Verify from the destination, never the transfer meter. |
| A generated index shipped stale because a manual step was skipped | If a step must happen in an order, make the tool print the order. |
Notice the pattern. Six of seven are the same bug in different clothes: a confident report of something nobody actually checked.
That is what this whole method is built to catch — and it will catch you, not just the people you write about.
What not to build
The temptation is enormous. A number next to a politician's name feels like rigor and it spreads. It is the single fastest way to destroy everything else you have built.
The test: if your score has round numbers, or varies by party label instead of by a cited action, it is fabricated. You made it up. Delete it.
We killed a scoring formula on this project four separate times. It kept coming back because documents describing how to build it stayed on disk. The only defense that worked was publishing the methodology page in advance — dated, where a future version of us couldn't quietly overwrite it.
Write down what you refuse to do, publish it, and date it. Then it costs you something to break your own rule.
Also don't: assign individual blame for collective outcomes, treat an allegation as a finding, or treat a decline-to-comment as a statement. "Alleges," "was charged with," "was convicted of," and "did it" are four different facts.
Start here — the minimum viable version
Do not build a fifty-state database. Build one page about one thing you actually care about.
- Pick one claim you have heard and cannot verify. One. In your state.
- Write the scoreboard — every checkable assertion, with a verdict column including COULD NOT VERIFY.
- Find one primary source. The bill, the opinion, the agency page. One.
- Email one official named in it, offering the right of reply.
- Write one page with dates, citations, and a "what I don't know yet" section.
- Publish it even though it is incomplete. Especially because it is.
That is a working civic help desk. Everything else is depth.
The first one took us a day, and we got three things wrong along the way and published all three corrections. The corrections are why anyone should believe the rest of it.
The honest part
This does not scale the way you want it to. Verification does not parallelize. Ten claims sent at once produces ten shallow passes; one claim worked properly produces a court opinion, a corrected record, and a live state deadline nobody else printed.
One claim, one session, one page.
And it will make you unpopular with people who liked the version where you agreed with them. A page that runs the same check on both sides will disappoint everyone who wanted a weapon.
That is the point. The moment your page becomes useful to one side, it has stopped being useful to a citizen.