Ahead of the World Press Freedom Day on Sunday, 3 May, Govindraj Ethiraj, co-founder of Boom, a fact-checking website spoke to leading experts in the digital media space to understand what role the media is playing in providing verified information to its viewers/readers in times of COVID-19.
Speaking on the panel of four speakers, Ritu Kapur, Co-founder of Quintillion Media said that the major problem is that journalists are not able to do a lot of ground reporting. Kapur added that’s causing a problem of limited access.
She also emphasised the need to fact-check information and how the readers are consuming fact-checked content which is indicative of their preference for more verified information.
Adding to what Kapur said, Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief of The News Minute said that by and large print and digital media houses are providing the information that people want, but ground reporting has been restricted which makes it difficult to get authentic information.
Senior Journalist and Founder of Editorji, Vikram Chandra was also on the panel and he spoke about the need to provide the most accurate and authentic information to viewers.
“Our USP is to gather information from large places, put it together into byte size packages, just the pieces of information that are relevant to viewers,” Chandra added.
He also spoke about press freedom and pointed out that ‘systematically there is an erosion of liberties’.
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