FactCheck.org has won the 2019 Sigma Delta Chi award for excellence in professional journalism in the fact-checking category from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).
A project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, FactCheck.org was honored for an August 2019 story examining President Donald Trump’s claims about the U.S. domestic steel industry. 
The story, “Trump’s Steel Industry Claims,” by FactCheck.org Managing Editor Lori Robertson and Director Eugene Kiely, took an in-depth look at Trump’s repeated claims that the U.S. steel industry went from “dead” or “going out of business” to “thriving” because of the 25% tariffs he imposed on imported steel.
The story found that the “tariffs on steel imports benefited domestic steelmakers, but the president exaggerates the changes for the industry.”
The award “recognizes excellence in fact-checking, in a single work distributed on any platform,” including print, online, TV, radio “or shared by other means, such as in a podcast,” according to the SPJ.
This was FactCheck.org’s second Sigma Delta Chi Award. The staff of FactCheck.org also won the non-deadline reporting award for independent news sites in 2011 for its health care reporting in 2010. That entry consisted of a package of five stories, which also included work by Robertson.
