Trust and Credibility: How NetaData is Going to Earn It
‘Presstitute.’ Depending on their tolerance, journalists in India either detest this term, or mockingly hold it up as a badge of honour, after having survived several troll attacks.
To me, the term, which gained currency in the run-up to the 2014 general elections, is abhorrent and disrespectful. Both to journalists and those forced to earn their living through the sex trade.
But those who use it do have a point, however distastefully they choose to make it—which is really that as TV news networks, print and digital pursued growth in the last 15 years, they lost the trust of the people.
Now there are some good reasons why they did that (“who’s going to pay your salaries?!”) and some bad reasons (“because there’s no other way to run a company!”), but it’s not my intention here to describe how and why.
What I will do instead, is tell you how I’m going about building trust with our audience and community.
NetaData is described as ‘independent’ and ‘non-partisan’. What this means is that we will try our best to remain independent of outside influence, and where it is difficult to do so, we will communicate our biases. To enforce this position, we’ll focus on at least four areas.
1. Transparency about funding.
This one ought to be a no-brainer — but I can already appreciate how difficult it is to walk the talk when it comes to disclosing your sources of funding.
Luckily, since I’ve just started building NetaData, my needs are not massive and I can afford to look carefully at cheques.
But what happens if a brilliant investor comes along who treasures their anonymity? How will I describe that investment? I’m not sure I have the answers to this yet, but am thinking it through and will update you on this post as soon as I know.
2. Corporate & political disclaimers.
As the founder, I plan to reveal any investments I’ve made in companies—which, to be honest, is just five shares in Network 18. They’re probably worth close to Rs. 250, or $4.
I also plan to reveal whom I’ve voted for.
For the record: I’ve never been a party member, and have never voted for any major national party such as the Congress or BJP, or a major ‘regional’ party such as the JD(S). In the two general elections I covered, I was too busy reporting to vote, and in the one state election I covered, I ensured—controversially—that I voted for an independent candidate.
I’m thinking of encouraging all potential employees of NetaData’s to make this disclaimer, which is an interesting challenge, because people have the right to not reveal whom they’ve voted for.
3. Story disclaimers.
Another option I’m mulling over is whether it would be a good idea for editors in NetaData to provide small commentaries on why they focused on any one particular angle for a story, what data they left out, why, etc. The idea being that readers can decide for themselves where the bias lies in a particular story.
4. Identifying sources.
Indian news, specially television, has a lot of “sources say”, “a source tells us”. I’ve seen this used more as a tool for speculation than the reporting of news. (I parroted these bits of ‘news’ for many years too as an anchor, so I’m equally culpable.)
Bottomline: I’m thinking of a policy of always identifying sources, so their own motivations are on display. Of course, this is controversial and will probably mean saying ‘no’ to very many sources and stories. At the very least though, I want to get as close to identifying the source of a story as possible.
I hope this explanation of my approach is intelligible. But for those who want to know how I came to these conclusions, there’s Malcolm Gladwell’s disclosure statement from 2004, and a July 2011 issue of The Economist on the future of news, in which I first came across the term “transparency is the new objectivity.”
