The mission of E52: to discover, report and share the story of innovation, including the business behind it
With the extension of E52 to a European platform (or rather: a European network of local innovation platforms), the appearance and name of this site are also changing. On June 4, at the end of the opening meeting for Dutch Technology Week, we will reveal the details. In a short series, we want to offer you an explanation of the backgrounds, our plans and our motives. Today part 2, about our journalistic mission.
It is certainly not so that the story of innovation has always been out of focus for media. But there are few media that cover this topic consistently, structurally and with a local focus. E52 jumped into that opportunity more than three years ago. And since then, we have been focusing – from our HQ in Eindhoven – on discovering, reporting and sharing the story of innovation, including the business behind it. This is going so well that we are now in a position to broaden our scope: firstly in Munich (see the first story in this series), but later, possibly, also in other innovative places in Europe.
But that does not change our mission, let alone our journalistic approach. Wherever we go, we keep on searching for the people and organisations that are shaping our world of tomorrow. And time and again we do so within a logical local context. This will give the stories the power they need to make an impact. But we will not stop there. We will also start providing an international context for everyone with more than local interest. By also presenting the innovative initiatives in a way that enables our readers to compare them to similar initiatives, we provide the much-needed embedding of each single topic. In thi,s way we show that in more places in the world work is being done to solve one specific problem. Or that a certain theme at location A gets a completely different approach than it does at location B. All in all, this should make the reader wiser about the status of the innovation itself.
But then, of course, the information has to be reliable. We all see around us that questioning facts (“fake news!“) has become a business in itself; a reason for us to pay even closer attention to the correctness of our reporting. We do this on three levels: first of all our own reporting, of course, but also by means of technology and crowdsourcing. Technology can help us do this in two ways: with curation tools we can more easily than before check how other media deal with a particular subject, and with a blockchain application (which is now being built by our partner Katalysis) we ensure that proven reliable articles carry that stamp forever – even if they are shared further by third parties. For the last check – by you, the readers, the crowd – we have a message ready that will soon be visible with all our articles:
“We attach great value to reliability. You can be sure that all our articles are made with the greatest possible care and that we have done our utmost to build up our factual information from all relevant sources. We use our expertise and technology to further that process. At the same time, we do not pretend to ever be able to be complete in this respect. As a reader, you can help us further by pointing out imperfections, inaccuracies or misinterpretations based on your own expertise. This can be done in the comment section under each article or by sending an email to the editors.”
Finally: of course, our effort will not only be about articles (in three languages) on a website. No, just like now in Eindhoven, we will continue with producing events, books, newspapers, newsletters, whatsapp services and everything else that is needed to tell the story of innovation in the best possible way. Stay tuned!
Related Posts
