Ethics, Corrections, and Standards

This document is meant to guide us as we create news and information. This policy may get updated from time to time, based on feedback and perceptions. Since the circumstances may differ for various types of news and information we deal with, this policy should not be considered as universal for every scenario or as hard established rules.

Conflict of Interest

We take special care wherever and whenever possible to avoid conflicts of interest or any appearance of it.

Payments

In any case, we do not accept payments, gifts, or free tips from any news source – individual, business (profit/non-profit), or organization (government/non-government).

Fairness

We are committed to fairness and believe that no story is fair if it does not have the facts, is not significant, and incomplete. Also, the story should be relevant and not misleading to the user.

Opinions

We separate out the news and information which is purely based on opinions by highlighting it clearly to the user as – analysis, perspective, opinion, or review, so the user can understand that the news and information are from the perspective of someone else who is either a subject matter expert, renowned personality or critic.

Social Media

Our social media accounts represent the organization and avoid usage of any text, image, or video for political, racial, sexist, religious, or other bias or favoritism.

National/Community Interest

We are concerned with and believe that the interest of the nation and community are served to the best of it in terms of dissemination of news and information. Any claim of national interest by any federal/local official does not automatically equate with the national/community interest.

Verification and Fact-checking Standards

Our reporters are completely accountable for reporting, writing, and fact-checking the news and information. The news and information are sometimes reviewed by more than one editor and may include fact-checks. The number of stages for review depends upon complexity, sensitivity, and the availability of time.

Corrections Policy

We always strive to bring and present complete and accurate news and information. We take the corrections seriously and act promptly to correct them if any. We provide our users with the complete right to know the reason behind any error and correction made.

Minor Corrections

We often correct our articles, image captions, headlines, graphics, videos, and other media. We always publish the required corrections at the earliest possible.

Major Corrections

We make the necessary corrections (which are comparatively more significant than minor errors) and update our stories on the web platform. Besides, we also notify the users as we make corrections to the stories and mention it on the stories that have been updated, considering the change is significant and makes sense to the user, usually on the stories that keep developing over time.

Clarification

In scenarios when the information is correct on the grounds of fact and accuracy but the user is not able to understand due to the lack of any clarity or details, he or she expects, when reported to use, we rewrite/represent the content in order to make the user understand it in an easy and clear way.

User-flagged Errors

When a user reports an error in the comments section, our monitoring team notifies them of the corrections made in the comments stream. Any erroneous news and information (discovered or reported to us) that is posted on social media platforms are also corrected by our social media team. We, in any case, do not blame our individual reporters or editors and consider it completely as a production mistake.

Take-down Requests

We do not take down our stories until and unless there is a valid reason behind it, in which case we investigate the cause. If it is due to inaccurate news and information, we re-investigate the facts and publish a corrected version of it. For stories that demand follow-up, we create the follow-up story with a link relating to the initial story, which again is not taken down but a follow-up story is published so as to not leave it on a misleading conclusion, in any case.

If in any case we publish the publicly available personal data and get a take-down request, we only consider it if the person is under a physical or mental threat due to the material we have published on our platform.