Verizon Media CEO on building consumers' trust in the media

Guru Gowrappan, CEO of Verizon Media, discusses how the media can restore people's trust.

Video Transcript

GURU GOWRAPPAN: When you think about trust, for us, one of the biggest things we have done is, we got out of user-generated content. So if you look back to Verizon Media's core strategy, we said one of our pillars is trusted content. What that meant is, when you have user-generated content, it automatically doesn't lead you to verify it easily.

So for us to bring that, a lot of media companies have to work together to have common processes and policies to verify a lot of sources. We do that when we have political ads that come into our ecosystem or any content that comes in.

Number two, who are the sources you work with? If you think about our own journalism, Yahoo Finance to Yahoo News to all these properties, we focus a lot on getting the right source and doing the right homework and having all the validation points and not going [? back ?] [? in ?] user-generated content.

So I think you have to first start with the right inputs, which is making sure company strategies are clear. And it's not about getting clicks, but actually about building that trust by giving the right information for consumers.

The second part of that input is having the right policies and procedures. And that's what-- we've been focused on it. And then three, look, you are going to always have consumers-- many times there is a point of view. They may not like news, but there is a point of view, that they want to think that the news should be a different way. You can't change that. I think the user behavior is going to continue to happen.

Our job is going to be always to come out with [? as ?] balanced view and share different sources. The other example I would use is Yahoo News 360. We give you the left and the right and let the consumer choose which ones they want to read and what they want to consume.

So a lot of that comes down to building the right input processes, having the right sources, having processes, policies, and then getting feedback from consumers on what's working, what's not working. And UGC, for sure, is not the right path for us.