News Broadcasting
The Trusted News Initiative forms Asia-Pac network
Mumbai: The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) partners have agreed to expand their global representation by establishing a regional Asia-Pacific network.
TNI’s new Asia-Pacific network of media organisations has received training funded by the Google News Initiative to help their journalists navigate the disinformation environment.
The TNI is an industry collaboration led by the BBC of major news and global tech organisations working together to stop the spread of disinformation where it poses a real-world risk. The Asia-Pacific network will allow the TNI’s regional partners to share their insights on combating disinformation and discuss regional trends. Through the TNI cooperative framework, they will draw on their expertise to share best practices and findings with the larger TNI and alert each other to the most dangerous forms of disinformation.
The TNI is expanding its Asia-Pacific presence with the addition of various groups of independent news organisations, including ABC (Australia), Dawn (Pakistan), Indian Express (India), Kompas (Indonesia), NDTV (India), NHK (Japan), and SBS (Australia).
BBC News International Services senior controller & BBC World Service director Liliane Landor said, “With the creation of TNI’s first regional network, we are bringing together trusted Asia-Pacific news-publishing organisations to further reinforce our collaboration and to make it even more efficient and productive.”
Google News Lab head Matt Cooke said, “As part of the Google News Initiative’s ongoing efforts to strengthen journalism and fight misinformation, we’ve worked with a range of academics, news organisations and nonprofits across the globe for several years. Now, we’re supporting the Trusted News Initiative to deliver targeted, expert training workshops on a variety of digital tools to help journalists as they seek to continue day-to-day verification and fact-checking in newsrooms across the region.”
AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Information Futures Lab, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft, The Nation Media Group, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, and The Washington Post are current TNI partners.
The TNI partnership works collectively in four main areas:
Fast alert: creating a system so organisations can alert each other rapidly when they discover disinformation that threatens human life or disrupts democracy.
Intelligence sharing: a real-time conversation of equals between news organisations and tech platforms about the evolving nature of harmful disinformation.
Media education: sharing insights and research on how audiences and users react to disinformation, thus informing best practice and supporting better digital literacy.
Engineering solutions: sharing information on engineering solutions for authentication of trusted news sources and improving the information environment.
This is entirely separate from, and does not in any way affect, the editorial stance of any partner organisation.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
