Talking back to the news with NewsTrust

Who doesn’t like to talk back to the news? That, in its essence, is the idea behind NewsTrust, a site I’ve been involved with almost from its inception in 2005. The basic idea is to rate news stories on journalistic criteria such as sourcing, fairness and depth. You can rate news organizations, and other reviewers get to rate you as well.

Last week Mike LaBonte, a volunteer editor for NewsTrust who lives in Greater Boston, visited my Reinventing the News class to lead a hands-on demonstration. Dividing the class into four groups, we reviewed a story in the Washington Post on a day in the life of an Iowa tea-party protester.

It was a difficult story to rate, and my students were of two minds. On the one hand, the story was woefully incomplete, and the reporter allowed the protester to make all kinds of ridiculous assertions about President Obama and health-care reform. On the other hand, the story had value if viewed not in isolation but, rather, as part of the Post’s ongoing coverage. As a result, student reviews ranged from a high of 3.5 (out of 5) all the way down to a 1.7.

We followed that up with a class assignment: each student was asked to find, post and rate at least three stories, and to write about the experience, as well as the positives and negatives of NewsTrust, on her or his blog. Here is our class wiki, which links to everything.

Unlike previous semesters, we did not participate in a news hunt on any particular topic. Thus you’ll find stories ranging from the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the pending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to lighter fare such as why yoga appeals mainly to women.

Students have differing views about the value of NewsTrust as well. One positive aspect, it would seem, is that perusing NewsTrust restores some of the serendipity that existed back when everyone read a print newspaper every day.

Yet Mark DiSalvo observes that Google News and the people he follows on Twitter already put news stories in front of him that he might not otherwise know about, and with less technological hassle. “Google News has better customization tools, and the people I follow on Twitter are already people whose taste I trust,” he writes.

Hannah Martin writes that NewsTrust makes her think about the news in a more critical and discerning way. “What I liked about the reviewing experience was it forced me to really analyze my news on its journalistic value, which, as bad as it sounds, is often something that slips my mind,” she says. “I browse the headlines of nyt.com, read what looks important, and accept it as fact, rarely stopping to count sources or assess context. The process of reviewing though, forced me to think through all the elements of each piece, and consider what, as a journalist, should ultimately be there.”

My own view is that NewsTrust is potentially valuable as a crowdsourced front page — an alternative to letting the New York Times or the Washington Post tell us what the most important news of the day is. The problem is that the software is time-consuming and not particularly intuitive, even though it has been improved over the past year.

And though NewsTrust claimed more than 15,000 registered users by the end of 2009, most of the stories you’ll find seem to have been posted and rated by just a small handful of regulars. This is not surprising. Studies have shown that two much-bigger crowdsourced sites, Wikipedia and Digg, are the handiwork of small numbers of unusually active users.

I hope NewsTrust will continue to grow, because the idea is sound. The challenge is that crowdsourcing only works when there is a crowd.

NewsTrust J-hunt: The final five

My stint as host of NewsTrust’s journalism topic area comes to an end today. Here are five stories I submitted this morning:

• For The New York Times, the digital future is now by Daniel Terdiman, CNET News
• TV Paparazzi Turn Cameras to Corporate Titans by Brian Stelter, The New York Times
• About that newspaper “doomsday” list by Alan D. Mutter, Reflections of a Newsosaur
• How Newspapers Must Change to Survive by Michael S. Malone, ABC News
• Brawl Street: Get Read to Buy Low! And Sell Die by Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show”

I could write an entire post on the last item, but I’ll just say this: Stewart is perhaps the best and most important media critic we’ve had since A.J. Liebling.

His dissection of CNBC’s Jim Cramer last night — as well as his two eight-minute pieces lampooning the so-called experts of CNBC (here and here) — will have, I predict, a major and well-deserved negative effect on the network.

On and on the NewsTrust J-hunt goes

But it all ends tomorrow! Today’s five six picks:

• Many Would Shrug if Their Local Newspaper Closed by Andrew Kohut, Pew Research Center
• Iraqi who threw shoes at Bush jailed for 3 years by Hamza Hendawi, The Associated Press
• Life, online, after the Rocky Mountain News by Robert Niles, Online Journalism Review
• Google News Archive Search Shows Promise for News Organizations by Amy Gahran, Poynter.org
• Newspaper failures are old news. It’s time to focus on solutions. by Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor
• The MinnPost Model: Is it sustainable? by Matt Snyders, City Pages

Here, once again, is NewsTrust’s journalism topic page. Please consider taking part.

NewsTrust: The J-hunt continues

Five more stories on journalism for your perusal:

• APIs: The new distribution by Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine
• Defogging the Economic Crisis by Jamie McIntyre, American Journalism Review
• Why is Jim Cramer shouting at me? by Gabriel Winant, Salon
• CPJ calls for Iranian president’s intervention in Saberi case by the Committee to Protect Journalists
• Behind the Incredibly Shrinking Media by Paul Armstrong, Business Week

If you’d like to join in the fun, sign up for NewsTrust and visit the journalism topic page.

Five more for NewsTrust’s journalism hunt

Here are five more pieces about journalism that I’ve posted to NewsTrust.

• Get Off the Bus: The Future of Pro-Am Journalism by Amanda Michel, Columbia Journalism Review
• Preaching Ethics, D.C. Pol Threatens to Squash Tiny Paper by Marc Fisher, The Washington Post
• Four Types of Online Aggregation by Howard Owens, HowardOwens.com
• Journalism Goes Local with Times, Patch, New Start-ups by Michael Learmonth, Advertising Age
• Want to save your local paper? Read this first. by Alan D. Mutter, Reflections of a Newsosaur

Again, I invite you to register with NewsTrust, review stories and submit some that you find as well.

Journalism about journalism on NewsTrust

My reading and blogging habits will be substantially different this week, as I am hosting the journalism topic area for NewsTrust.

NewsTrust is a social-networking tool that enables community members to submit and rate news stories on qualities such as fairness, sourcing and importance. If you’ve never tried it before, I encourage you to sign up and give it a whirl. I’ll keep you posted on what I’m submitting this week in the hopes that you’ll pitch in.

Here is what I submitted this morning. The links will take you not directly to the story but, rather, to a NewsTrust review page. From there you can go to the story and review it for yourself.

• Ex-WaPo Editor Jim Brady to News Sites: Experiment More, Now by Steve Myers, Poynter.org
• Paid Content: You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard by Ken Doctor, Content Bridges
• The Future of The New Republic by Paul Waldman, The Daily Beast
• United, Newspapers May Stand by David Carr, The New York Times
• Where Were the Media as Wall Street Imploded? by David Folkenflik, National Public Radio

Hope you’ll consider taking part.

Northeastern students on NewsTrust

Earlier this week, I said I would post on my students’ experience in using NewsTrust, a social-networking tool that lets you share and rate news stories on qualities such as accuracy, sourcing and bias.

Well, I did — but not here. My oversight. Instead, I posted a roundup on the class Web site. And here, in a bit of post-post-modernism, is what NewsTrust had to say about what my students had to say.

A NewsTrust news hunt on the global economy

Following a presentation on NewsTrust by editor and frequent reviewer Mike LaBonte, my students in Reinventing the News have been finding, submitting and analyzing stories on the global economy. NewsTrust is a social-networking tool aimed at identifying and promoting quality journalism.

I asked each of my students to submit, rate and write a short critique of three different stories on the global economy — part of a “news hunt” that NewsTrust is conducting this week. I thought I’d do the assignment, too, so here are my choices.

The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, is something of a disappointment: an article about pressures on the International Monetary Fund that is so bureaucratic and top-down in its orientation that it’s impossible to understand the effect of those pressures on ordinary people. Even if you grant that we shouldn’t expect much from a brief overview, it’s hard to know what we are supposed to take away from this story.

Moving right along, we come to a roundup in the Guardian on how plummeting oil prices are affecting four major oil-producing states — Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. As with the Monitor story, there is a top-down quality to this that leaves me a little cold. Nevertheless, it is well-executed, and provides some interesting insights into the changing fortunes of regimes that were riding high just a few months ago.

Finally, CNN offers a story on world hunger that, like the Monitor and the Guardian, is too short to get much beyond the superficial but which, unlike the Monitor and the Guardian, grabs us with the riveting, heartbreaking testimony of an aid worker who frequently travels to Haiti.

“It’s horrible. They have to choose among their children,” Patricia Wolff tells CNN. “They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go.” The story demonstrates a key point about good journalism: even a brief report about global developments can be conveyed in human terms.

NewsTrust, which I’ve been following since its founding a couple of years ago (disclosure: I’m a volunteer editor), is one of the more interesting experiments in building a community around the news. If you haven’t checked it out before, you should give it a look.

I’ll post on what my students have been up to later this week.

Re-editing the agenda with NewsTrust

For the past week students in my Web journalism class have been immersing themselves in NewsTrust, a social- networking site that bills itself as “Your guide to good journalism.”

Last Wednesday Rory O’Connor, NewsTrust’s editorial director, led us in a presentation and workshop, highlights of which you can see in the embedded video below. Since then, we’ve been posting and rating stories related to the global economy, which was NewsTrust’s featured topic.

NewsTrust’s strength is also its weakness. Unlike Digg, which simply allows you to vote on whether you like or don’t like a story, NewsTrust asks users to rate stories on a wide range of criteria, including whether you think the news organization is reliable, how well sourced the story is, whether it’s fair and whether the story offers enough context.

In all, there are 12 different criteria, each of them demanding a rating of one to five stars. Though you may leave any particular criterion blank if you choose, that’s still a lot — and you haven’t even gotten to writing a comment, adding tags and filling in several other forms. That’s quite a bit of work.

Still, the idea is a good one. It’s a way for ordinary readers — well, ordinary readers who happen to be news junkies — to re-edit the news, to judge for themselves what are the best and most important stories rather than relying on the editors of the New York Times, the BBC or what have you. Some readers who don’t want to submit or even rate stories may be intrigued by the idea of tapping into the wisdom of the NewsTrust community to find news they might otherwise never see.

According to O’Connor, testing has showed that journalists and non-journalists give stories similar ratings, which suggests that the NewsTrust system, though cumbersome, actually works. Perhaps the biggest drawback at the moment is the NewsTrust demographic, which O’Connor compares to the PBS audience: well-educated, aging and very liberal. Lack of ideological balance could hinder NewsTrust from becoming the well-respected guide to which its founders aspire. They understand the problem and are hoping to come up with some solutions.

Another interesting feature is that users themselves are rated in terms of how transparent they are about their backgrounds, how often they submit and rate stories and what other users think of their ratings. This, as well as community judgments about the reliability of different news sources, all gets figured into the algorithm that comes up with a score for any given story.

According to my students’ blogs, NewsTrust could be improved if it were less text-heavy and loaded more quickly.

As more people begin to use NewsTrust, its ratings should become more useful. I’ve submitted and reviewed several stories and felt like I was shouting into the wind, as no one else rated them. I do think it would be interesting if there were some way of knowing how many other people had at least read the story.

Social networking is the hottest trend in media today. By trying to combine social networking with serious journalism, the founders of NewsTrust have hit upon one of the more promising experiments in online journalism.