The Telegraph’s first-ever mention of PolitiFact – then a fledgling, fact-checking project of the St. Petersburg Times – occurred in an editorial dated Jan. 2, 2008, about a week before that year’s New Hampshire presidential primary.

In that editorial, titled “Fact-checking sites good tool for voters,” we encouraged our readers to take advantage of online sites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.Org to “cut through the malarkey that has become a staple of American political campaigns” to reach an informed decision in the voting booth.

We would go on to cite the work of PolitiFact in other editorials over the years, whether it was to acknowledge the organization’s introduction of the “Obameter” – an ambitious project to track the more than 500 promises then-candidate Barack Obama made in the 2008 campaign – or to remind voters to take advantage of this valuable resource in later elections.

So the announcement last Sunday that The Telegraph and Valley News are partnering with PolitiFact for the New Hampshire presidential primary campaign is a logical progression of our longtime commitment to provide our readers with more than the standard day-to-day coverage of political campaigns.

By way of some examples:

• In 1995, The Telegraph joined with The Associated Press, New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire Public Television to form Voters’ Voice, a media partnership whose goal was to find out what was on voters’ minds and then ensure the presidential candidates addressed those issues during that primary campaign.

The organization commissioned an issues poll to develop a “citizens’ agenda” and then set to work to coordinate roughly a dozen forums around the state in which small groups of voters could directly question a presidential candidate for 90 minutes without interference from the media.

• In 2002, we introduced “Ad Watch” into our political coverage of that year’s state elections, evaluating some of the candidates’ radio and TV ads for accuracy and effectiveness.

• And in 2008, starting with the Sunday of June 29, we published a weekly series of pieces by FactCheck.Org that examined claims made by the nominees for president – Obama and U.S. Sen. John McCain, of Arizona. The series ran for 18 weeks and alternated between fact-checking statements of each candidate.

Since our initial mention in 2008, PolitiFact has earned the Pulitzer Prize for fact-checking more than 750 claims during the 2008 presidential campaign. It also has set up partnerships with newspapers in nine states.

The plan is for us to fact-check statements originating in New Hampshire – from candidates, political parties or other groups – in the run-up to next year’s election.

Since our Sunday debut, we and the Valley News have fact-checked statements made by two of the GOP candidates and the White House press secretary, as well as an outdoor anti-Obama sign in Keene. Links to them are available through the PolitiFact 2012 New Hampshire logo on our Web site.

We hope you find these and future stories helpful in evaluating the truthfulness of candidates between now and the primary. And if you come across a statement that sounds a bit fishy, please e-mail politifact@nashuatelegraph.com.