NewsTrust: Hunting for Quality News Articles Online

A few weeks ago, a guest speaker named Kaizar Campwala came to our class to talk about NewsTrust.net, a website dedicated to promoting good journalism online.

Thank goodness.

The site is still in its beta stage, but it already looks promising to me. It allows for a new type of "citizen journalism" where members can submit articles under a variety of topics ranging from foreign policy to social networking. Members can then rate an article on a one to five-point scale system based on ideals such as whether the story is informative, fair, well-cited, accurate, etc.

From this, the site also promotes news literacy, providing members with tools for evaluating journalism online. Readers can therefore view the most quality articles - those that received the top-rated reviews - and can also compare and contrast news stories about the same topic but from different sources.

I actually found myself spending more time on NewsTrust than I originally thought I would. I created a profile and revealed some information about myself in order to increase the impact my ratings would have. I found several articles on foreign policy, the given topic for our class that week, read them and rated them. This definitely allowed me to use critical thinking skills in regards to evaluating news online. I also included brief commentary to support my numbers.

Overall, I think NewsTrust is a great website with lots of promise for the future. The makers of this site still need to figure out a way to actually draw an audience to their site. When Campwala presented his slideshow about the company, he had one slide dedicated to what their ideal goal looks like. One example is to partner up with search engines so they can include a small tag at the end of each article showing its current rating based on the 5-point scale.

Hopefully NewsTrust will continue to grow and be able to achieve their goals soon.