NewsTrust Founder Fabrice Florin Answers Your Questions

On August 18 and 19, you submitted questions for NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin about his (non-profit) site's ability to live up to its claim, "Your guide to good journalism." We sent selected questions to Fabrice on August 19. Here are his answers.

1) News to me?
by conner_bw

Why haven't I heard about your site until reading this on Slashdot five seconds ago?

Fabrice:

NewsTrust kept a low profile during our first year's beta phase, so we could grow the quality of our service with a select group of founding members. We're now getting ready to launch a new and improved site in coming weeks, and will be promoting it extensively this fall. In the meantime, the word is getting out quickly, and our traffic is doubling every quarter, thanks to our first partnerships with leading news and information providers like PBS, Huffington Post and Scientific American. We've also received some great advance press coverage from many prominent journalists and bloggers. As a result, our nonprofit news site has rapidly gained momentum with concerned citizens, journalists and educators, and we expect to expand rapidly in coming months. To find out more, please sign up on our site.

2) So why should I trust your 'users'?
by anomnomnomymous

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

Fabrice:

NewsTrust is unique in that it involves experienced journalists (over 24% of our members have 5+ years of news experience), along with educators and thousands of news consumers. By using NewsTrust's state-of-the-art news review tools and interacting with professionals, our reviewers can effectively evaluate fairness, evidence, context and other core principles of journalism -- based on quality, not just popularity. Independent research by the University of Michigan confirms the reliability of our review process.

To insure the reliability of our feeds, we rate our reviewers based on performance, expertise, transparency and recommendations from our staff and other members. We then weigh their ratings accordingly, so that trusted member ratings count more than new member ratings. The weights used in rankings are posted on our site, and you're most welcome to test the math used by our sophisticated computer algorithms.

NewsTrust's innovative evaluation methodology brings together the diverse fields of journalism, content analysis and computer science. We are the first to combine these disciplines into an integrated, effective review process, which is designed to help the public gain a deeper appreciation for good journalism.

3) Forgive me if I seem a bit jaded
by dedazo

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?

3a) Re: Forgive me if I seem a bit jaded
by zappepcs

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?

Fabrice:

We share your concerns about the low information quality of first-generation social news sites like Digg or Reddit. Thesepopularity-basedservices are too unstructured to be reliable, and threaten to displace quality news and information with a growing stream of hit-driven infotainment and misinformation -- in our view, this trend jeopardizes good journalism and puts democracy at risk.

NewsTrust offers a smart, practical and well-designed alternative to these popular entertainment sites. A quick comparison between the NewsTrust home page and Digg's on any given day makes this very obvious, as noted by numerous industry observers.

NewsTrust is very different from these mob-based social news sites. We offer a novel solution to help people find good journalism - by tapping into a growing network of reviewers that sharethe same journalistic values. Our community creates its own front page of quality news and opinion from trusted sources, combining nuanced computer algorithms with professional and consumer reviews. And to extend the quality of our service, we partner withtop news and information providers, independent journalists and digital media innovators.

4) Re: Javascript
by _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.

Fabrice:

Thanks for your thoughtful recommendations about improving our web site. I'm not an engineer, so I cannot respond directly to your concerns - but I have forwarded your suggestions to our engineering team and we will address this issue in the next version of our site.

In the meantime, keep in mind that we're a small, underfunded nonprofit startup, with a couple part-time engineers - and we are outspent 20-to-1 by other, well-funded commercial news sites. As a result, our technology is not as slick as theirs, and it takes us longer to develop it. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

5) Rewards?
by eldavojohn

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.

Fabrice:

Most of reviewers appreciate the informational value of our service and are happy to contribute to our cause because our collective evaluations make us all better informed.

They also find our review process useful for their personal development, because it helps them tell good journalism apart from misinformation, making them more discriminating news consumers and growing their news literacy skills.

Besides these important benefits, we reward our top reviewers by featuring them prominently on our home page, our blog and email newsletters. We also invite them to participate in regular nationwide conference calls, where they can talk to experienced journalists and help define our editorial and community objectives.

The most active and trusted reviewers are invited to become hosts, and the best hosts can also become editors. At each step of the way, they are entrusted with more privileges and recognition. As members gain trust in our network, their member levels rise and their ratings are weighted accordingly, giving them more influence and a greater stake in our community.

6) Accuracy over Fairness or Balance
by internic

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 exceedingly 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.

Fabrice:

Thanks for sharing your insights on this important topic. We agree with you that accuracy and factual evidence are the most important criteria for determining the quality of news and information. However, these qualities take much longer to evaluate, because they require extensive fact checking, which a casual reviewer doesn't have the time or the resources to conduct regularly.

So we have designed a review process that helps people quickly and reliably evaluate information quality by looking at how that information was gathered. Our diverse rating criteria reveal a great deal about a reporter's professional standards and methods, based on core principles of journalism.

You are correct that some subjective rating questions like fairness and balance can sometimes be hard to answer - and that answers can be influenced by the reviewer's pre-existing viewpoints. But we provide helpful review tips to make the task easier, and increasing our reviewers' impartiality and news literacy is a major part of our mission. On average, our research shows that our group ratings are generally quite reliable, because we carefully weigh each rating criteria based on its importance for the story under review, as well as each reviewer's overall member level.

7) Partnerships with left-leaning organizations
by guanxi

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 news about John McCain. Not surprisingly, the articles that were posted leaned very heavily left.

What can NewsTrust do to address these issues?

Fabrice:

Thanks for your kind words about NewsTrust. I am glad that you find it an excellent resource, and am grateful that you have used it regularly since it came out.

Your point is well taken that many of the articles featured on our site tend to reflect liberal values. This is not intentional, as we try hard to run a nonpartisan news evaluation service. This temporary leftward tilt may be caused by the fact that some our early adopters share liberal views, a trend shared by many other popular Internet sites.

But we plan to address this issue in coming months, in a variety of ways.

First, we already state our nonpartisan policy clearly on our site, encouraging our members to check their ideology at the door and review the news with a neutral viewpoint. When we find reviewers who systematically rate stories in a partisan manner, we contact them and politely remind them of our nonpartisan mission, encouraging them to adjust their review style, so we can increase their member level accordingly. Until they do, we keep their member levels low, so their ratings have little influence on our service.

Second, our staff submits every day many stories from publications that appeal to political viewpoints from the right and center. As a result, we've seen ratings for publications like the Wall Street Journal increase in recent months, which suggests that our members do appreciate the quality of their coverage, given an opportunity to review it.

Third, we are reaching out to many publications from the right and center to partner with NewsTrust as we have with the Huffington Post. Specifically, we have contacted or started discussions with editors at Fox News, InstaPundit, the Moderate Voice, National Review, Real Clear Politics, TownHall.com, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard, to name but a few. We hope that several of these publications will partner with us this fall to engage their communities in a shared quest for quality information. Partnering with NewsTrust can help the public develop a better appreciation for quality news and opinion from these leaders -- and support the journalistic values we all share.

8 - 12) Echo Chamber?
by PoliTech

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 (Little Green Footballs), 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?

Fabrice:

Issues raised in this question have already been addressed in previous answers.

We believe these issues will be solved over time, as we broaden our community to make it more representative of the public we serve. We've started discussions with several large online portals who have told us they can solve that concern with just one flip of a switch, by sending more visitors to our site.

In the meantime, we welcome a wide range of political viewpoints on our site, and constantly invite individuals with diverse perspectives to sign up and play a leading role in our community. We are delighted to have a mix of republicans, independents and democrats as advisors, hosts and members: they have all made significant intellectual contributions to this project, and we are thankful for their willingness to put their differences aside to work on this common cause.

By focusing on factual evidence and constructive dialog, we hope NewsTrust can bring Americans closer together and that we can all learn from each other, across party lines.

-----

Comments

I don't see how.

[BitterOldGUy]

However, these qualities take much longer to evaluate, because they require extensive fact checking, which a casual reviewer doesn't have the time or the resources to conduct regularly.

So we have designed a review process that helps people quickly and reliably evaluate information quality by looking at how that information was gathered.

Quickly and accurately - wouldn't that be nice if it were true. If the reviewer doesn't have many facts and has to do it fast, then the reviewer's review is completely bogus.

Re:Which is it?

[TheRedSeven]

Also, the comments:

To insure the reliability of our feeds, we rate our reviewers based on performance, expertise, transparency and recommendations from our staff and other members. We then weigh their ratings accordingly, so that trusted member ratings count more than new member ratings. The weights used in rankings are posted on our site, and you're most welcome to test the math used by our sophisticated computer algorithms.

and

When we find reviewers who systematically rate stories in a partisan manner, we contact them and politely remind them of our nonpartisan mission, encouraging them to adjust their review style, so we can increase their member level accordingly. Until they do, we keep their member levels low, so their ratings have little influence on our service

These are not diametrically opposed, but show that the NewsTrust system is also open to significant bias. The representative claims that the "trusted" reviewers are given more weight, but then admits that some member levels can be kept artificially low.

While this power can be used beneficently, there is also great opportunity for abuse. The leadership could decide that someone was showing 'partisan bias' compared to the prevailing reviewers, and down-mod them for it.

What prevents this from becoming a more systemic, detrimental problem? Our trust of the system administrators?

Who watches the NewsTrust watchers

[guanxi]

First, thank you for your thoughtful answers, Fabrice and thanks for responding to my question. They have given me much more confidence in NewsTrust than I previously had.

Many answers mention that NewsTrust relies on its staff to maintain the quality of the site. For example, the staff posts right-wing material to balance the content and warns users who are too partisan.

My question is, why should readers trust your staff's judgment and fairness more than they trust other readers? Who watches the watchers? There is no perfect solution, of course. At the end of the day, every institution is run by humans, not angels, but how do you manage this issue?

Thanks again.

Re:Who watches the NewsTrust watchers

[ProlificLurker]

For example, the staff posts right-wing material to balance the content and warns users who are too partisan.

I don't think that is the answer. Why not remove biased material instead of trying to "balance" it with more biased material? It's just like Jon Stewart said of Crossfire... 2 guys with opposite OPINIONS is in no way news.

Not sure about this...

[jellomizer]

(over 24% of our members have 5+ years of news experience), along with educators and thousands of news consumers.

5+ years of news experience. The slanting of news has been an issue a lot longer then that. 5+ years makes sure they have solid arguments for their side.

Educators oh that Unioned group isn't political bias. I was given a textbook for a class that talked about unions a whole chapter was on the benefits of union, A paragraph on the negitive effect, with most common argument stating not enough information for this is evaluated (to me meaning we didn't want to risk our findings so we didn't study that angle) And Teachers who want to give a balanced view often do so in a hushed tones in their voice. The most blanced class I ever had was American Government taught by a adjunct who is a Citizen of an African Country (We never asked where).

Thousands of people who are protesting Fox News Fair and Ballanced, Granted that Fox New isn't balanced and it is very right based. But the people who are protesting it and finding other sources tend to be to the left. As people who are to the right would feel that it is more balanced as it covers the areas they feel strongly about.

Re:Not sure about this...

[Naughty Bob]

Exactly what I thought. He's asked a question about how this news site will be less prone to bias than that which infects existing news media.

His answer is 'Oh, don't worry, a quarter of the people we have are journalists.'

Priceless.

buzzzzzzz

[vimm]

Here's an incomplete list of cliches, techno buzzwords, and salesman speak from the replies. Enjoy!

• state-of-the-art news review tools
• innovative evaluation methodology brings together the diverse fields of journalism, content analysis and computer science
• sophisticated computer algorithms
• nuanced computer algorithms
• I'm not an engineer
• I have forwarded your suggestions to our engineering team and we will address this issue in the next version of our site.
• just one flip of a switch
• we're a small, underfunded nonprofit startup outspent 20-to-1 by other, well-funded commercial news sites

Actually, that turned into a pretty good summary

Re:Which is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts exist in a fluid state and flow towards the opinions of the quoted "expert". Forget the "facts", stick to documented observations and append "in the opinion of" where appropriate.

"An IP address identifies a specific person" got past way too many news agencies and court "fact checking" processes.

Sorry, they are too left leaning.

[Shivetya]

I don't care about his assurances, I have read his site since the time it was posted here and its just another way for journalist to claim professional and unbiased view points all without actually living up to it. Its one thing to claim it but he is undone by the stories and his companies associations. The problem is that he doesn't see the bias because its just every natural to think that way.

I really think he has no clue as too how little trust many people put into media people anymore, having five plus years of experience to me means they are probably biased to an extreme already because even the freshest minds out of college are beat down by hardliners in the industry. Educators. Well lets just say, his two support categories all lean left and lean left hard.

So I've been there, laughed it off really quick. I will still read it this week and see what the stories are like compared to when the republican's have their convention. I seriously doubt they will change. Let alone the fact I didn't see any stories related to OTHER parties.

Being without bias first requires knowing what you like isn't necessarily right.