Citizens’ news rating service of the day’s top stories
One way to build trust in individual news stories is to vet them through a review process accessible and separate from the editorial process within a single news organization. NewsTrust is a new effort to do exactly that:
The free NewsTrust web site will feature top-rated news providers and the best news stories on a variety of important topics. This news rating service will be fully searchable, and include links to featured stories and their sources. Each story will be carefully rated for accuracy, credibility, fairness and relevance by a non-partisan team of practicing journalists and trained “citizen reviewers.” This high-quality selection of “news you can trust” will be updated daily on the Web – and a personalized news feed can also be sent to you by email. Think of it as a “reliability filter” for your news.
Headed by Fabrice Florin, advisors for the project include Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, John McManus, Bill Mitchell, Rory O’Connor and Kim Spencer. Not yet in production, a prototype of the front page can be seen here.
More about collaborative news projects are included in this useful overview: Is CraigsNews’ Coming Soon? in a May 19 article in Technology Review.com.
One question about these projects is financial: the NewsTrust page reports that 59% of the respondents to a recent market study said they would pay $10 a year or more for the service. If users are paying for a news aggregator that promises credibility and quality,what would be the incentive for paying for an individual news site separately? If users can get all the news they need on NewsTrust, the $64 million question remains: who will pay for the foundational journalism being evaluated, dissected and linked to across the Web?
