Don’t forward or even ‘like’ a post that you think has information that you haven’t been able to verify — especially if the claims seem surprising to you.
As a part of our series about “the 5 steps we can take to win back trust in journalism” we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Chandran Sankaran.
Chandran Sankaran, Founder and CEO provides overall guidance and direction for the development of Gigafact. He has also founded Repustar, an incubator of technologies to strengthen societal immune systems against online misinformation. He is a judge for the annual Mirror Awards for excellence in media industry reporting. Sankaran has previously been a successful software entrepreneur, having built two companies that helped change how corporations manage their supply chains and financial management processes.
Thank you so much for joining us. Before we dive in, our readers would love to ‘get to know you’ a bit better. Can you share with us the “backstory” about how you got started in your career?
I’ve been an entrepreneur in the software industry over a couple of decades having built two companies that solved pressing problems for large corporations by organizing data and process flows. A few years ago, after the sale of my last company, I did a hard pivot to face the global information disorder problem. I had no professional experience in the media and journalism industry but had deeply held concerns as an information and news consumer. I believed that we needed a new system of signals to help us rapidly discern well-researched sources and content from merely popular content that is unsupported by facts. That led to me founding the nonprofit Gigafact, and starting a couple of other projects in this space.
Do you have a favorite book that made a deep impact on your life? Can you share a story?
I don’t know about “deep,” more like “fun”. We may know Roald Dahl as the person who wrote grim-humored children’s fiction like Matilda, James and the Giant Peach or through his collections of mischievous adult short stories. His autobiography “Going Solo” is about his first job as a very young man in Tanzania in the period leading up to World War II. I may have gifted more copies of “Going Solo” to people than any other book. It’s utterly romantic and adventurous. The idea that you can set out on your own into the world, early in life, and find your way so cheerfully through some pretty hairy circumstances was quite inspiring to me as a way to live life and tackle problems.
Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?
I had the opportunity to intersect with three legendary tech companies when they were really tiny — all within a short span of time. Leaving grad school, I interviewed and received a job offer from a small software startup in Redmond, Wash. called Microsoft. I didn’t join them, but took a position at HP instead. A couple of years later, when I was at HP, I was on the team that gave an early contract to a tiny company of a few dozen people called Cisco, and I remember meeting the founders in a small office. Some months later, I did business with the founders of a tiny software services company in Bangalore, India called Infosys. All three companies went on to become absolute titans in their industry. It’s fun to reflect on how greatness presents itself before it is revealed! Imagine knowing The Beatles in Liverpool in 1960 before they were a worldwide phenom or being in the same high school class in 2000 as Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga).
Can you share the most humorous mistake that you made when you first started? Can you share the lesson or take away, you learned from it?
At a business dinner some years ago, I mistakenly thought the person sitting at my table was an accomplished author, whose work I had read and loved, and who I knew was present at the event that evening. It wasn’t my fault — he looked remarkably like the jacket photo of the author! I was at my unctuous and smarmy best, trying to impress him. And at some point in the evening, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. I quickly disappeared from that assigned spot at that table for the rest of the evening, mortified beyond belief. But, unfortunately, the people with me at that table have never let me forget it. What did I learn from this? Very little, I’m afraid. Perhaps, I’ve learned not to care quite so much and to accept that we all need to laugh at ourselves from time to time.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
I helped create and launch the nonprofit Gigafact 18 months ago. Gigafact is catalyzing a network of smart, transparent, nonpartisan news sources to deliver facts into social media threads on subjects that they know a lot about. We have seven great newsrooms across the U.S. in the network today, and we hope to be a network of 20 newsrooms by the end of 2024 — which is a very important year for the U.S. and democracy in general. Our ambition is to be a network of thousands of great sources across the world, each helping information consumers in their moment of need, and collectively rebuilding the presence of authoritative journalism in the digital sphere.
What advice would you give to your colleagues in the industry, to thrive and not “burnout”?
The media and journalism industry is currently in a tough place, and it can sometimes be discouraging to try and have a positive impact. I’m a fan of cultivating a vibrant “other life” in arts, sports and other engaging activities, to stay energized and lighter about one’s work. I play the guitar and sing in public performances, and I’m grateful I have that outlet when I am at my most obsessive at work.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the main parts of our interview. According to this Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans trust the mass media. This is disheartening. As an insider, are there 5 things that editors and newsrooms can do to increase the levels of trust? Can you give some examples?
I recently re-read the Code of Ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists. It’s pretty good, and feels like minimum stakes for all newsrooms to follow. But in today’s polarized world, where audiences are getting information from whichever information source is at their fingertips — I think it’s not nearly enough. Here are three more things I would say is now required for newsrooms in order to be effective and build trust:
Newsrooms should think of themselves as customer-service organizations. Where do information consumers live today? On social media and other digital platforms. If you are in the ‘informing business,’ you should be seeking to serve them where they are in their moment of need at their current level of knowledge, and not expecting them to come and find you and work hard to get information. This has lots of implications for a more audience-centered and engaged style of journalism, but without losing the fundamentals of great news products. Serving customers well builds trust, in ways that are deep. You may think what you like about Amazon, but the reason they are so successful is that they figured out how to serve people with a very predictable and high-quality experience that changes how you shop. There is a lesson to be learned from that.
Subject yourself to external evaluations and assessments of bias and factual performance — and publish those results. Make this score important to how you hire, promote and fire people. Staying nonpartisan and not taking sides in story selection and fact development and selection is hard work — and requires systems and processes that allow you to hold yourself accountable.
Decide if you are in the news and investigations business, or if you are in the opinions and analysis business. I would recommend not trying to do both under one brand or even one ownership structure. If you are in the news business you need all the trust you can get, and I believe that eliminating opinions and editorials will clear the decks to allow a great news site to be valued for what it is, and differentiate itself from the proliferation of Substacks, podcasts, YouTube channels and the like, which exist primarily to deliver opinions and arguments to information consumers.
In general, I’m more optimistic on behalf of smaller, local newsrooms that have not yet become polarized and distrusted. For larger corporate media that have been in the limelight, and which have for one reason or another lost public trust, it’s a harder road — but I do believe the same ideas apply.
What are a few things that ordinary news consumers can do to identify disinformation, and help to prevent its dissemination?
- Educate yourself on fact-checking resources in your area — how to find a fact-check for commonly circulating claims? Duke Reporters Lab has a directory of fact-checkers.
- Utilize free services that assess factuality of websites. Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias Fact Check are two free services that are useful. We released a free Chrome browser extension called FactSparrow that helps with this, too.
- Do a Google search to verify a claim that you encounter “Is it true that xxxx?” The quality of the first couple of pages of Google’s search result is quite impressive.
- Don’t be nervous about introducing well-researched facts into threads on social media and messaging threads of your friends and family when you see something crazy talk — but do it nicely so it has a chance to do some good.
- Don’t forward or even ‘like’ a post that you think has information that you haven’t been able to verify — especially if the claims seem surprising to you.
Can you share your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started” and why? Please share a story or an example for each.
Here are a few things that I wish I had learned earlier in my career when I first started.
- Start your career close to customers in functions like sales, marketing, customer-service, customer support — you learn things while serving customers well that are invaluable business and life lessons. You learn to listen to their goals and aspirations, and what they are struggling with — and that makes you a better problem-solving partner.
- Learn to sell and bring in revenue — it’s what makes everything work. It’s what funds great products. It’s what allows you to attract investment in your idea. Learn to interview and bring in great salespeople to whatever your idea or project you are pursuing.
- It’s okay to be a ‘whole person’ at work. You don’t have to compartmentalize your personal life away from my work life as much as you think you do.
- Synthesize ideas that you are trying to communicate into a one-sentence version and one-paragraph version and one-page version — so you have all three on the ready for when you have the opportunity to communicate. This is hard to do — but always worth trying.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The information-integrity problem strikes at the root of all human cooperation, at democracy, at solving problems such as climate change. Social media and digital platforms control a significant portion of how consumers get information. They need to be incentivized to value facts and good information sourcing above popularity and vitality.
So… send a message to your favorite social platform on their “privacy” helpline and ask them to do the following:
- Give you an option to not accept information or a feed from a user who has not been verified to be a real person (eliminate bots, AI and false personas)
- Give you the option to easily do an internet search on a claim right from a post that you encounter to do a reality check — without needing to leave the thread you are on.
- Give you the option to mark whether you have checked the validity of a post before you like or forward it — so it informs people downstream.
Send a note to your local congressperson (federal and state) too.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram. Gigafact is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit as ‘Gigafact Project’.You can follow the work of Gigafact newsrooms at gigafact.org and on X at @factbriefs.
Thank you so much for your time you spent on this. We greatly appreciate it, and wish you continued success!
Chandran Sankaran of Gigafact On 5 Steps We Can Take To Win Back Trust In Journalism was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.