Ask NewsTrust Founder Fabrice Florin About NewsTrust — Or Anything Else 72
NewsTrust is, to quote from the site's header, "Your guide to good journalism." Specifically, NewsTrust links to stories published both by well-known media and by less-known blogs, and asks its users to rank and review those stories on accuracy, balance, context, evidence, fairness, importance, information, sources, style, and trust. It's an ambitious effort with an impressive group of advisors, that is starting to be taken very seriously by a growing number of people who follow media matters closely. Founder Fabrice Florin is reasonably impressive himself. He's been a leader in online multimedia content for many years, and if you remember the excellent mid-1980s documentary film Hackers, he's the guy who directed and produced it. Fabrice is kind of a "behind the camera guy," so there aren't a lot of interviews with him out there. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
So why should I trust your 'users'? (Score:5, Interesting)
Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if there was actually content displayed without turning on javascript. Maybe it wouldn't allow you to rate articles without JS on, or something of that sort. It's an instant turn off to go to a site and see no content without javascript. Unless that site has content that can't be obtained elsewhere there is little reason to even bother turning it on to inspect the site and see if it is worthwhile.
Re:Forgive me if I seem a bit jaded (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, I agree with dedazo. How will you foster a user base that is news centric rather than lolcat centric?
It's casual common sense to understand that the MSM is not going to go in-depth on news stories. Musharraf's resignation is huge, but there is (so far) no in depth analysis of this news. Anything that vaguely smells of conspiracy gets all too much of the wrong attention. How will you avoid falling foul of these types of news ruts?
Re:Imagine that. (Score:3, Interesting)
I gather you mean this [slashdot.org], right?
Rewards? (Score:3, Interesting)
How is this better or different than the 'diggs' or 'mod points' people on other News sites acquire?
Naturally, I am concerned with positive reinforcement being given to those that deserve it and the ability to overlook the inevitable negative material the internet is so adept at producing en mass.
Parent has an interesting question. (Score:2, Interesting)
How did you get such great stealth advertising on Slashdot for your Digg-clone site? Regardless of the answer - hats off to you - I'm sure it will be quite a boon!
And...who owns you? So you have any link what so ever with Slashdot?
Unfortunately, with the web, journalistic and editorial integrity has become questionable. Unlike print or broadcast which takes millions of dollars, putting up an internet "journalist" site takes nothing. Anyone can call themselves a journalist and post whatever they want.
Accuracy over Fairness or Balance (Score:3, Interesting)
It's clear that some news sources are just plain bad at getting the facts correct. It's also true that many of us feel there are news sources out there that are very biased in their presentation of matters, in some cases (e.g. with state media) becoming little more than propaganda. But in talking about issues of fairness and balance isn't there a danger of getting bogged down in these more subjective matters, to the detriment of a focus on more objective things like factual accuracy?
It seems to me that any community rating system on "balance" or "fairness" runs a big risk of falling prey to groupthink. For one thing, if a majority of users favor one sort of bias, users with a minority viewpoint may feel marginalized and eventually stop contributing. I haven't seen any systematic research on the topic, but I think many of us feel we see this happen on various user-driven sites. It isn't even clear to me how one can have an objective standard for fairness or balance.
To put a fine point on it, I am part of the group that loathes Fox News (among others) for their exceeding bad news coverage. People seem to focus on the issue of bias, and this argument usually quickly devolves into a a stalemate between ideological camps, with people arguing about, for example, whether Fox News is worse than CNN. I wish people would just focus much more on all the facts they get wrong or make up: Obama's so-called "terrorist fist bump" and labeling Mark Foley as a democrat come to mind as two examples. I think most reasonable people can agree that these are simply false and constitute bad journalism, and we can agree to work against any source prone to such errors on that basis.
Partnerships with left-leaning organizations (Score:3, Interesting)
I happen to lean left myself and I've read Newstrust daily almost since it came out; it's an excellent resource. But I think it's clear that the selection of articles leans left:
* For example, see this list [newstrust.net] of the most highly rated posts. You see the NY Times, Wash. Post, NPR, Huffington Post, The Nation, Alternet, FAIR, which range from moderate to liberal. What is missing is right-leaning publications, like the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, OpinionJournal, etc.
* Also, a few months ago, NewsTrust formed a partnership [newstrust.net] with a partisan liberal publication, The Huffington Post [huffingtonpost.com] to find new about John McCain. Not surprisingly, the articles that were posted leaned very heavily left.
What can NewsTrust do to address these issues?