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Ask NewsTrust Founder Fabrice Florin About NewsTrust — Or Anything Else
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.
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What's there to assure me that these newssites rankings aren't being astroturfed?
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Follow the link provided, AC. It's not referring to the 1995 Hackers film with Angelina Joulie.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
But after a quick look-see on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Propeller and a few other "important" social websites, I see that the prevailing majority is still parroting the usual "OMFGWTFBBQ BUSH 9/11 ANTHRAX MSM MIKKRO$AFTZ RON PAUL SHEEPLE TAH POLICE R BAD" line.
On the other hand, Musharraf stepping down hardly got a peep from them as of this morning, probably because most of them can't figure out the importance of that event. Lots of funny lolcat links though.
How exactly are your users any different from these?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I'd like to find a girlfriend. She can't be fat, ugly, old, crippled, etc, and must like tossing salad, fisting, scat, and watersports. What should I do????
You wake up from that dream and settle for the emotionally broken girl who doesn't believe she can do any better than you.
How do you really judge what is considered balance.
If you are Left leaning then the balance will be towards the left. If you are right leaning then the balance will be to the right. Fox News "Fare and Balance" is from people who are right leaning, and saw the media and thought it didn't give their side appropriate thought. NPR the same thing but to the left. Being that it is the internet and it tends to attract more clique then a truly diverse set of people who is to say the ranking isn't done by a bunch of people to the left who feel that Fox News and other right outlets has tilted news to the Right so they group up and say the Left articles are fair or vice versa.
Then there is the statical correlation between Liberal and Conservative (And I am talking about the brawedest sense of the words), being the Liberals want to change things while conservatives want to keep things as they are. So in general Liberals make the news more then consertivies as they are trying to change things, vs. trying to keep things they way they are tends to be less news worthy.
Think about it what is a better article.
People Protest to lower the speed limit on the interstate in their state to 55mph.
or
People Protest to keep the speed limit as it currently is.
There is more news in the first as there is the question of why the change is needed what benefit and tradeoffs it will gain. vs. the second which we generally know what is happening.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
The secret societies of politically biased internet kooks will tear that site apart.
Unless the entire point of the site was to get all these idiots to continue to drive up the number of page views (and ad revenue) as they try to spam the ratings mechanism, then it's going to be fairly worthless in the long run.
Is that a prequel to the excellent mid-1990s documentary film Hackers?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I gather you mean this, right?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
How do you reward your users? What mechanisms will/do you employ to promote meaningful and thoughtful tagging and discourse?
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
So you have any link what so ever with Slashdot?
Don't ask these types of questions or someone with copious (maybe even infinite!) mod points will mod you as Flamebait!
I'm sure that Rob just felt that we needed to know about a new, obscure news aggregation site with Digg-like submission and voting buttons. Rob only had our best interest at heart. And of course, in addition to knowing about this site, he realized without us knowing that we'd be fascinated to ask the person who launched this site all kinds of questions because he had some tie-in to a movie with a technical cult-following.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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 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 with a partisan liberal publication, The Huffington Post 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?
"if you remember the excellent mid-1980s documentary film Hackers, he's the guy who directed and produced it."
If I don't remember that movie, is he still the guy who directed and produced it?
Will this site be encouraging homophily, or will there be a negative feedback mechanism such as LibraryThing's UnSuggest to encourage more dynamic balance?
Are the News stories and blog posts themselves subject to this "balance" or is it the "perceived credibility" of the source news outlet that determines ratings and discussion?
For example if a given story is from LGF, ones preconception may be that the news presented will be heavily slanted to the right regardless of the facts, and if the source were Daily KOZ one may expect the opposite.
Do you think that "balance" is currently reflected in the site's "front page" results?
Is any evident "political" bias currently on display subject to any editorial change or negative feedback mechanism in the future?
Is this to be simply another clone of politically leaning news/blog conglomerations like Pajamas Media or Village Voice?
Do you think that all social networks are eventually destined to become echo chambers in one form or another as evidenced by Digg's deterioration, and as currently on display at NewsTrust?
I saw NewsTrust when it first came out, and was one of the "founding" user-editors. I spent quite a lot of time seriously reading stories and rating them, particularly focussing on stories in my area of professional expertise (physical sciences). But I gave up in disgust after a few months, as it became clear the community (or at least that segment of it fanatical enough to spend the time necessary to push its agenda) could have been imported whole from digg.com. A crowd of folks apparently amazingly shallow, with a microscopic attention span, a taste for the sensational and paranoid, and whose moral viewpoint is so unimaginative and monolithic that it would make any totalitarian dictator sob with envy oh! if only I could get my subjects to march together in such perfect lockstep groupthink.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the concept of the "community-driven" news site is an abject failure. Allowing a free-wheeling democracy to pick your top stories is basically just a method for discovering the lowest common denominator in taste, discovering what an electronic edition of the National Enquirer would publish, more or less. It's most definitely not what the inventors thought they'd get, which is the better discovery of unusual, underreported, or controversial stories. You get the very opposite of intellectual diversity, ironically enough.