VettNews Launches Plans For Tool To Improve Corrections Process For Newsrooms
Entrepreneur and professor Paul Glader and his team members announced today plans to build and test a product that aims to improve the corrections process of news organizations. Their initiative is supported with a $75,000 investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Glader and his team at Vett Inc. / VettNews plan to build an automation and workflow tool that improves the way corrections are received and managed by news organizations. It aims to increase the accuracy, transparency and speed of the process. It also aims to improve the public trust in responsible news outlets.
“The public trust in the news media is at a historic low,” Glader said. “News organizations recognize that citizens want them to openly correct mistakes but few newsrooms have bandwidth to create a better corrections process than what has existed for decades. As a result, they are missing corrections and missing opportunities to involve readers in the corrections process.” A 2018 Knight Foundation report shows 90 percent of people say their trust in news organizations depends on the news orgs commitment to accuracy and willingness to openly correct mistakes.
Glader directs the non-profit training organization, The Media Project, which will serve as the grant administrator and its award-winning online news magazine, ReligionUnplugged.com, which will test the initial corrections tool.
Three other news organizations will also serve as early test partners of the product. Blank Slate Media LLC on Long Island, which owns a chain of weekly newspapers and a web site, TheIslandNow.com, for readers on the north shore of Long Island, has signed on as a test partner. Glader and team are also finalizing agreements with two other media companies.
Glader is a professor and director of the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute at The King’s College in NYC and is co-founder of startup Vett Inc. and its VettNews vertical. Vett is a Swedish word that means “Savvy.” The team at VettNews launched an initial product in 2018 and participated in the 2018 spring cohort of the Combine accelerator from the NYC Media Lab. The team spoke to more than 30 news organizations about the corrections process and gained insight about the kind of product newsrooms would like to use. The team aims to build and test such a product before further commercialization.