El fact-checking hispanohablante: competencias, dificultades y propuestas de mejora desde la perspectiva de sus profesionales.

Fact-checking has become a global journalism movement that is considered essential to fight against disinformation and address demands for new communication processes. Spanish-speaking fact-checking is constantly growing, with the number of platforms in Latin America and Spain increasing by more than 100% from 2018 to 2021. Collaboration networks between these platforms are also being implemented to address disinformation beyond national borders in the Spanish-speaking world. However, academic research regarding this phenomenon has mainly focused on fact-checking practices without paying much attention to the professionals themselves: the fact-checkers. Understanding the challenges faced by these professionals in Spanish-speaking contexts is key to contributing to the development of this activity beyond the Anglo-Saxon perspective. In this work, we conducted a survey (n = 52) among Spanish and Latin American fact-checkers. The professionals were asked about their perception on fact-checking's link to journalism, the competences they believed necessary for fact-checking, the main difficulties they usually face, as well as their thoughts on proposals for potential improvements. The survey results were then enriched by conducting 13 in-depth interviews of Spanish-speaking professionals and academics with expertise in fact-checking. Studying these variables is key to design new, more adequate and attractive curricular proposals to improve the training of future journalists and help them face the enormous and complex but necessary and urgent task of fighting disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]