(Pocket-lint) – Since the beginning, Pocket-lint has always strived to offer the best journalism it can. In a world where the lines are being constantly blurred, understanding the news is getting ever harder.
What are the motives to covering the story, who is behind the decisions, why has that angle been taken? These are just some of the questions the Pocket-lint team asks itself every time it finds a story and before the writing starts.
Understanding what a story is, where it has come from, and what it means is now more important than ever.
Fake news
Sometimes those lines aren’t clear and telling the difference between what’s factual news, analysis, opinion or advertising can be hard, and that’s before you ask yourself whether the news is genuine or not. The Trust Project, a consortium of top news companies led by award-winning journalist Sally Lehrman, is developing transparency standards that help you easily assess the quality and credibility of journalism.
Over the last year, Pocket-lint has been working with the group to ensure that a number of Trust Indicators are present on all Pocket-lint articles to help you easily determine what type of article you’re reading.
“Pocket-lint contributes a valued dimension to our network. It’s important for the public to know when technology reviews are free from outside influence and consumer-oriented content adheres to strong journalistic standards. People deserve honesty and integrity in this type of content every bit as much as they do in daily news reporting,” says Lehrman, founder and CEO of The Trust Project, of Pocket-lint work.
Having completed the programme, you’ll now see a small “Trust Mark” (T) at the top of articles on Pocket-lint, be it a news story or a review, that will let you know the article you’re about to read can be trusted.
Trust Indicators
The Trust Indicators – there are 37 in total but 8 main ones – are standardised disclosures about a news organisation’s ethics and other standards for fairness and accuracy, a journalist’s background, and the work behind a news story.
Created by leaders from over 100 news organisations, including input from Pocket-lint, leading publications from around the world including the Washington Post, The Economist, Italy’s La Repubblica, and La Nación in Argentina have collaborated to create a set of guidelines for sites to follow.
The Indicators help people know who and what is behind a given news story through disclosures about:
- Best Practices (Standards and Policies)
- Journalist Expertise
- Type of Work Labels
- References
- Methods
- Locally Sourced
- Diverse Voices
- Actionable Feedback
The 8 Trust Indicators, a widely accepted transparency standard developed by The Trust Project in collaboration with the public and news organisations worldwide, help news media hold themselves accountable and ensure reliable, accurate news sources.
Pocket-lint was already doing a lot of the work, and eagle-eyed readers will have seen that we’ve been rolling out a number of these standards over the course of the last year, enhancing our offering as we’ve adopted the new procedures.
These Trust Indicators mean you’ll always be able to see things like clearly who wrote the article, being able to contact them if you have questions and understand how and why we’ve classified the article as we have.
Put simply, it’s about transparency and trust.
You can also quickly see our editorial standards which show you things like who owns Pocket-lint, what our ethics and diversity policies are, as well as how we deal with sources, corrections, actionable feedback, and more.
And it’s not just us telling you. These indicators, which have been peer-reviewed by The Trust Project, are also shared with external tech partners like Google, Facebook, and Bing.
Why should you care?
At Pocket-lint we’ve always tried to be the best we can be when it comes to writing articles for you to read.
We value your trust in us to get the story right, to be balanced in our approach, and not to have a hidden agenda.
With The Trust Project, now you don’t just have to take our word on what we do, but can easily uncover the work we’re putting in behind the scenes to make the articles we write as trustworthy as they can be.
Sadly, that can’t be said for every site on the internet, but at least we can say it about Pocket-lint, and hopefully encourage others to follow in our footsteps to help restore the trusted role of the press in civic life.
Writing by Stuart Miles. Editing by Chris Hall.
