Credibility of media houses is at an all time low. Even publications which were once considered credible source of information have fallen prey to sharing wrong piece of information. What\’s more shocking or rather painful as a journalist is unlike the previous generation, the new breed of journalists have so many tools available to them to verify the piece of information. Yet, they throw caution to wind and choose to publish whatever comes their way.

Very often I am asked if I was aware of this news or that news. Almost all the time it turns out to be wrong piece of information which is traveling far and wide all thanks to social media.

A recent widely shared news item will help you understand this better. It was regarding discovery of huge gold deposits in Uttar Pradesh. Almost all the media houses ran with the story. With that kind of coverage it was but natural that it became a hot topic on social media as well. There were many spin offs on this unverified information. Media outlets had a field day using their imagination to cover all possible angles. But they forgot one basic step – verifying the information available.

In the end it turned out that yes there is gold deposit but it\’s not in tonnes but in kilograms. I wonder what the media houses which were predicting how this discovery will impact our economy, have to say now.

There are days when news sense in a news room goes for a toss and all we have is information being shared without verifying the facts.

As someone who comes from news agency background, this training of verifying the information first always helped in a newsroom. I was leading a rather young team of content writers (gosh I hate this term), and we had people around screaming for getting out with the news first. The problem is not that you ran with wrong piece of news, it\’s that world will quote you as source of this wrong information. I too have been guilty of this crime but held on to publish button when I was not sure. It did save me some embarrassing moments.

As a responsible media house or someone who believes in the ethics of news, you have to be sure of information you are sharing. Waiting for a minute to confirm from multiple sources will only add to your credibility. Sometimes this takes longer while the world is already out with information and it\’s impact and what not. So should you declare a winner or declare a public personality dead because it is all over the place or wait for that second independent confirmation?

As a journalist (where are they) we owe this to ourselves first and then to our readers.