The Teen Fact-Checking Network Is Here Again
Now the hard part begins.
Dear friend,
I thought I should share a little update today. We've just launched the Teen Fact-Checking Network India for the second consecutive year. This is in collaboration with MediaWise at the Poynter Institute in the United States.
Look at these shiny, happy faces!
Other than me (second from left, top row), my colleagues, and a few parents, the rest are all budding teen fact-checkers. This year, out of 100-plus applications, we shortlisted some 25 kids for a second round, and held interviews with about 20 of them. Almost all of them were very good, but ultimately we decided to make offers to 11 students for this year’s cohort. Some of the others have been offered placed in 2025’s cohort. (Write to me at hrv@boomlive.in if you want to apply.)
So now we have 7 boys and 4 girls (last year’s lot was 2 boys and 11 girls). They represent diverse backgrounds from all over India. We have students from a government school, a French school, CBSE and ICSE schools, and even one who was homeschooled - or as his parent put it, "unschooled" (a concept I'm eager to learn more about).
Next week, we begin training them, and starting September, we’ll put them to work on fact-checks and digital media literacy.
This is an exciting time for us, but I’m also aware of the seriousness of the responsibility before us. The way I see it, we have three main tasks ahead of us:
Do the kids no harm/keep them safe.
Give them something useful for their CVs.
Teach them something useful for life.
The first task is akin to the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors. This means that we have to design a safe learning environment and teach them to be safe online. But it also means we have to keep them away from politics. This is more difficult than it sounds because fact-checking, by its very nature, involves fact-checking politicians and their allies. However small, there is potential for blowback.
We decided to tackle that issue by focusing on urgent issues such as medical misinformation and financial scams. We will also tackle a few ‘general’ cases of fake news.
The second task is easier, which is to give them useful skills for their college applications. Not only will we teach the kids to verify misinformation, we will also school them in the craft of writing fact-checks and teach them to produce videos. Here are two examples [Instagram links] from last year’s cohort. The first one is by Sana1. The second is by Shraddha.
The third task, which is to teach them something that will improve their lives, is a bit more fuzzy in my head. We're considering focusing on critical thinking skills, guiding them to become independent thinkers, and honing their ability to make good decisions. I'm still refining our approach to this crucial aspect. Write a comment, or write me back on email, or on any another platform if you have ideas, hints, suggestions and/or big opinions!
Meanwhile, we’ve been on a bit of a journey figuring out our new logo. This was for Season One last year.
The laptop sticker that came out of this logo was a bit unwieldy, so for this year, we decided to build afresh and brought in the designer Tahani Khan to help us out. This was Version 1:
I liked the look of this, and isn’t there something nice to be said about serif fonts? But we needed something more obvious. Here is version two.
We liked this one more. But would a square-ish shape look better? Maybe it would!
I was OK with this, but our partner MediaWise suggested we could make it more compact. So here is the latest version:
I think this looks fantastic. But we’re still in the process of getting everyone to sign off, so who knows where this journey will end? I just thought that you might appreciate a look at the design process, which has taken more than a month!
Finally, and most importantly, none of this would be possible without my colleagues Divya Chandra and Titha Ghosh. They have the know-how and the nous to get a complex thing like this moving and running, and a bit more. I was going to add a paragraph about each of them, but none of it would be complete or demonstrate the breadth and depth of their skills. Instead, I have linked to their LinkedIn profiles.
We have a policy of not using last names in a bid to protect their privacy. I know that being on video is the very opposite of that, but our policy is to give the great tech algorithmic mill as little as possible by way of information.