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.

Comments

So why should I trust your 'users'?

[anomnomnomymous]

What's there to assure me that these newssites rankings aren't being astroturfed?

Judging political ballance.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Judging political ballance.

[Hatta]

And of course, there's the problem that reality has a well known liberal bias. There are times when "balanced" coverage is really not representative of the truth. Think of the coverage of the intelligent design controversy. If you were to give each side the coverage it is due based on the facts, you'd have a pretty one sided article. But the ID proponents are loud, and likely to skew the coverage in their direction, just because they're loud.

Javascript

[imunfair]

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:Javascript

[_xeno_]

It would be nice if there was actually content displayed without turning on javascript.

It's especially retarded because if you view the source, the content is all already there. The reason it doesn't show up is because of the little tab thingies. Rather than have a single tab already visible, it has all the tabs initially unselected and then selects one of the tabs when the page loads, thereby making a single tab visible.

There are several ways to solve this. Method A is to have a tab selected in the HTML and just accept that the tabs will be broken if JavaScript is broken (the easy way). Method B would be to have JavaScript create the tabs, and default to having all content displayed in a list. This is arguably "the right way" unless NewsTrust really has to have those tabs. Then they could use Method C, which is to allow the generating page to display different tab content based on query strings and linking the tabs appropriately as a fallback when JavaScript is not available.

But displaying nothing by default is kind of silly. The content is already in the page, it just needs to be made visible.

And I disagree that the parent is offtopic. It's a legitimate complaint, and the article is about the website. There are a ton of ways to browse the web these days, and not all of them fully support JavaScript if they support it at all. For example, if I pull the page up on my cellphone, which supports enough CSS to hide the stories but not enough JavaScript to support the tab JavaScript, I get an effectively contentless page.

Since this is an interview, I'll make this a simple question: why don't you add "sel" CSS class to the first tab? That should fix the problem without breaking the JavaScript tab system. (It's Method A above.) Note that, as with all Slashdot advice, I haven't actually tested that.

Be careful!

[bigtallmofo]

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.