On Sunday, editor-in-chief Gert-Jaap Hoekman looks back. This week: What we’re doing to improve the trust you have in us.
NU.nl is not a gym that you drag yourself to because you have taken out an expensive subscription. We are free. You visit us every day because you trust that we will present the news in a clear manner and explain it clearly. We must cherish that trust.
Fortunately, your trust in us is high, it turned out independent investigation† When we recently asked you for a rating, we got a 7.5. Super nice! That’s what I did in high school for.
But we also know that trust in the media is under pressure. So we like to do our best to improve your trust in us.
You want to decide what we write about
This year we started a major survey on trust. We asked you to start with what we can do to become even more reliable.
You were very clear. There should be more information available about how we make our money. We need to do more fact checks. And you want to influence which topics we explain more about.
But you also want to know why you do not read some news on NU.nl. I find that interesting. We don’t do enough with the things we don’t do. I often think that when I get a convincing explanation of why we don’t bring something to NU.nl.
For example, about the non-existent risk of cancer due to sunscreen. Or at the beginning of this week, when dozens of southern Europeans became infected with the monkeypox virus.
You may read those things from our competitors, but not from us. I sometimes find that difficult. I wrote it last week: I suffer from journalistic fomo. A bad quality that makes me nervous when someone else brings something we don’t have. While we often have an excellent reason not to. But you never hear them.
New: NU.nl did not make it
See you this week. We have started a new section: NU.nl did not make this† In that section we give you examples of things that don’t meet our bar. We explain our choices.
Of course it is ironic that something still appears on NU.nl, while we explain why we did not want that. But I hope this will give you a better idea of what we stand for.
Sometimes there is advancing insight, such as with monkey pox. We started writing about that when we saw that there was a massive search for this word. We will of course also tell you that in our new section.
Do you have a question or comment about this story? Mail the editor-in-chief: [email protected]. And you would help us a lot by filling out this short one minute questionnaire. Thank you in advance!