A Clarification

Dear Reader,

On 1 July, we carried a post on the Greek crisis on our website which had some problems—specifically, portions of the text had been used without attributing it to the original source. This was spotted by some alert Twitterati and Swarajya was sharply criticized by some people on Twitter.

We immediately investigated the veracity of the charge, found it to be true and ran an internal investigation of how this could have happened.

While the chain of events that had led to this was somewhat complicated, and did involve some sheer chance and bad luck and technology issues, we unequivocally admit that we made a mistake—the problematic article slipped through our process filters, both human and tech, even at the highest level of our editorial team. Further investigations are on, and our immediate course of action has been communicated to our editorial advisory board and other important stakehodlers.

As soon as we realized that we had made a mistake, we issued an official Twitter message to that effect from the Swarajya handle, and some time after that, took the article off the site.

We have an official Code of Conduct for our staffers, which we were bold enough to have had on our home page right from the day we set up the site, and we continue to abide by that code.

Our policy regarding mistakes that we may make, as stated in our Code of Conduct, is:

“We will adhere to a zero-tolerance policy in terms of correcting our errors. We will clearly communicate to all our readers the best way to reach us so we can promptly correct our mistakes. If we are aware of a mistake, we will correct our stories irrespective of whether a correction is being sought so that databases don’t contain uncorrected stories.”

Among the thousands of stories that we have carried on the site since its launch in September, we have had only instance before this—where a post was found to have been plagiarized, and we immediately withdrew the post and debarred the contributor.

We are taking steps to strengthen the editorial process, and team and writer communication, to make sure that such an incident does not occur again. We would like to assure you that we remain committed to the highest ethical and transparency standards. We will also continually try to improve our processes, whether human or technological.

We are grateful for the support that we have received from you and look forward to your continued support. Swarajya stands for honest journalism and always will. That is our promise and covenant with you.

Thanks