VettNews Cx technology installed at Indiana Wesleyan’s publications The Sojourn and GrantCOnnected.net
NEW YORK — The student journalism publications at Indiana Wesleyan University have installed the Cx Tool from Vett Inc. to improve the corrections management and reader feedback process.
"Partnering with Vett News gives our students a great advantage. Accountability and accessibility are crucial for any reporting platform, yet often, media consumers don’t see the results of their raising a question,”
“I am excited about our partnership with Vett News,” said Dr. Mark R. Perry, a professor and chair of the division of communication and theatre at IWU. “As we launch a new major in Multimedia Communication it provides our majors, regardless of whether they pursue journalism, "opportunities to interact with our audience. This interaction will give educational experiences to our students as to what news audiences expect in terms of accuracy and responsiveness. Additionally, it will give our students opportunities to educate media audiences on how our industry works.”
Thanks in part to a $75,000 investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Vett Inc. built the automation and workflow tool that improves the way corrections are received and managed by news organizations. With help from the Tanooki Labs developer studio in NYC, the Vett Inc. team built a corrections dashboard that improves the accuracy, transparency, workflow, speed and efficiency of a newsroom’s corrections and feedback process.
“Indiana Wesleyan is an early adopter of our technology and this demonstrates the journalism faculty at IWU are forward-thinking about how news outlets can improve their relationship with audience members,” said Paul Glader, founder of Vett Inc. / VettNews.com. “We believe the Cx Tool represents a dramatic leap forward to improve accuracy in news and the public’s trust in the news media.”
The public trust in the news media is at a historic low. Pew Research found 68 percent of Americans say they lack confidence in news organizations’ willingness to admit when they have made a mistake. In a Knight Foundation report in 2018, nearly 90 percent of citizens said their trust in news organizations depends on the news orgs commitment to accuracy and willingness to openly correct mistakes. Vett team members spoke with more than 30 newsrooms (high school, college, professional) in 2019 with 98 percent admitting their corrections process is clunky and telling us they would like a better tool or process that improves their relationship to readers.
Vett installs a small block of code (the length of a tweet) into a publisher’s CMS platform, which creates a button at the bottom of every article you publish and invites reader feedback. The feedback the reader gives flows into the Cx dashboard. Users log into the dashboard to respond and engage with a large number of loyal readers. The tool provides a more efficient way to manage this feedback at scale.
The Vett team believes the Cx Tool presents an opportunity for newsrooms to demonstrate leadership on an important zone for standards and ethics in news. It aims to improve the public trust in responsible news outlets and helps funnel paying subscribers to those news outlets.
You can also see and test the reader-facing button at EmpireStateTribune.com (the college newspaper of The King’s College in NYC) and at ReligionUnplugged.com (an award winning non-profit news outlet operated by The Media Project) and The Sojourn at Indiana Wesleyan University and at GrantConnected.net.
"Partnering with Vett News gives our students a great advantage. Accountability and accessibility are crucial for any reporting platform, yet often, media consumers don’t see the results of their raising a question,” said Amy Smelser, assistant professor of communication at Indiana Wesleyan University and the advisor to the Sojourn and GrantConnected.net, both of which are using VettNews’ Cx tool in 2020-2021. "Vett News lets us respond to and track our readers’ concerns as well as engage with them. I’m excited for this partnership and what we’ll be able to teach our students about multimedia communication through it."
Given the global pandemic in 2020 and economic headwinds on all sides of the news industry, the team at VettNews is making its Cx Tool free for 2020 and 2021 to all high school and college newspapers. The team at Vett Inc. is currently doing demonstrations and installations of the technology at numerous student publications.
If your newsroom is interested to see a demo or to install the Vett Inc. Cx Tool on your news outlets, email Vett Inc. founder Paul Glader at paul@themediaproject.org. Our team can also provide training on how to use the product. Follow us on Twitter @VettNews.
