Our Team
JET is being built by a small, interdisciplinary, passionate and reasonably idealistic team with a shared conviction: that the structural problems of the information age require structural solutions.
Rehan Rather is the founder of JET. A storyteller and creative at heart, he sees journalism as storytelling with rules — the principles — and those rules as the foundation of a functioning public sphere and democracy. His interest in information integrity was cultivated in college at Ashoka University, where he worked as a teaching assistant under journalist and professor Vaiju Naravane. After moving to Paris, he co-designed and taught a course on media ethics, history and law.
Growing up as an Indian Kashmiri Muslim — military kid, living across India, the United States, and France — Rehan has spent his life across the fault lines of culture, conflict and identity. That experience shapes how he sees people — what divides us, what doesn't, and how much depends on the stories we consume and tell.
His thinking on this problem began in 2016, which then felt like a "fake news" crisis, and gradually revealed itself as something far more structural and solvable. Over nearly a decade of following technology, media and democracy, the solution took shape — evolving from an index inspired by the Press Freedom Index into the navigation layer that JET is today.
Restlessly curious by nature, his professional background is in business development. He is passionate about understanding how technology and human evolution are intertwined — and how that relationship shapes the worlds we build. JET is where these threads have converged. So far.
Yash co-founded the first newspaper at his university along with a team of five other editors — not because it was required, but because he believed it mattered. That instinct toward building things that inform has stayed with him.
After a stint in finance that proved more draining than rewarding, he moved into media — and found his footing. Working across editorial and operational roles, he developed a particular sensitivity to how credible information is produced and structured: what a claim is actually based on, how it is supported. That pause, repeated enough times, became a conviction.
He cares about good information because he cares about what it makes possible — a just society, democratic life, the simple human pleasure of genuine curiosity. At JET, his editorial instincts and operational experience converge around a problem he has invested in for years.
The Problem
The core issue is not misinformation. It is the absence of navigational structures that allows people to understand how information is constructed, distributed and made influential. Societies have responded with centralised moderation, laissez-faire openness, or media concentration. Each treats the problem as one of content control. None restores public agency or enables democratic self-correction.
The Context
Publishing always carried accountability. Editorial oversight, professional norms and legal liability created friction — friction that, however imperfectly, aligned incentives toward accuracy and correction. The internet removed that friction. What replaced it was scale, speed and algorithmic amplification — indifferent to reliability, optimised for engagement. The accountability break was not inevitable. It was structural. And it has never been addressed.
Why Now
But the why now extends beyond technology. Societies everywhere are under strain. Democratic backsliding is accelerating across the globe. Geopolitical instability is reshaping how information is weaponised and consumed. And shared sense-making — the collective capacity to orient around common reference points, to self-correct, to sustain democratic life — is fracturing precisely when it matters most.
This is not a media problem. It is a civilisational one. And it demands a structural response.
Our Vision
JET aims to rebalance power in our information networks in the hands of citizens, bringing about a paradigm shift in transparency, awareness, and incentive structures that strengthen humanity's ability to inform, share, and make sense. We are creating public interest infrastructure.
One important analogy is a nutrition label. You are not told what to eat. You are given the information to decide for yourself. That information must have standards, checks and transparency. JET does the same for information — making visible the processes, structures and incentives behind what you read, watch and consume online. Not to adjudicate. To orient.
By informing across four layers, the content itself, its author, the publication it appears in, and the platform that hosts it, these layers expose the structural signals of accountability.
The ambition is a revolution and a fulfilment of the internet's promise as a democratizing force. A new layer on top of the existing web — open, decentralised, built on protocols that preserve user autonomy and resist censorship. A public forum where scores are challengeable, context is addable, and journalism is accountable to the people it serves. A self-correcting mechanism for the information age — much like the democratic institutions, peer review systems and free press, based on lessons of the Enlightenment era that no individual body has the authority to decree truth.