Speaking of quality journalism, we were delighted to win the CNN’s Young Journalist of the Year for 2007 Award, which went to Priyanka Narain for her series of articles on the Sethusamudram project. Amit Varma’s Thinking It Through column on our Views page also won the 2007 Bastiat Prize for Journalism. For a young paper, these awards as well as our growing readership are a valid-ation of our belief that even as journalism lite, with its emph-asis on gossip and entertainm-ent, seems to be increasingly becoming the norm, journalists who offer real substance, accuracy and even-handed reporting will have a firm place among Indian readers.
At Mint, being even-handed doesn’t mean we shy away from doing stories that deserve to be told. Be it our year-long series on the government’s inaction over fake drugs; the need for transparency and an open debate about the impact of organized retail; the troubles with India’s patent offices; the corruption and inefficiency at AICTE, the regulator for business and engineering education; our focus on how taxpayers’ money is wasted in unproductive Parliament sessions—we have provided unique and exclusive coverage aimed at taking a critical look at India with a view to making our policies and practices better.
And we have been prescriptive whenever we have had ideas—of our own or as a platform for ideas of others. Our Sixty In Sixty series, which highlighted individuals who are working to improve India, was an example of showing readers what can be done by ordinary people with extraordinary determination, and our Indian Century series carried essays by prominent experts on challenges that lie ahead and how to overcome them.
Because we have invited you to tell us how we are doing—every story in Mint carries an email that you can write to—thousands of you have written to us this past year. And we are grateful for your feedback, suggestions, complaints and compliments. We have tried to respond individually to many of you, especially when the feedback has been about errors. And I apologize if not every suggestion has been implemented.
You can be sure we remain very reader-focused in everything we do and will remain so, even though as a one-year-old we have to remind ourselves that we need to walk before we can run.
As regular readers of Mint know, from Day 1, we have had a clearly stated policy of correcting any errors we make in the paper. In the early days of Mint, some people would look at our daily Corrections & Clarifications box on Page 2 and wonder if Mint makes a lot of mistakes. My response was and is to say: “Not really. We are the only ones that own up to our mistakes.”
The number of errors we made and how we made them (Graphic)
So, how have we done on that front?
Just as bartenders are likely to break more glasses because they handle so many more such glasses, journalists who work with data and facts are bound to get some facts wrong. We have had our share of them.