NewsTrust: teasing out good journalism

Unfortunately you really do have to dig around, and sometimes deep, for some quality journalism. With so much of the news thriving on updates and infotainment, it’s nice to see an admittedly small group of news junkies coming together to point out the good stuff so we all can savor it, rate it and pass it along.

NewsTrust was created, according to one of its editors Mike LaBonte, to ease the pain of distillation that goes on in the search for news in the sea of information.

The NewsTrust system is a sophisticated version of Digg or Reddit and relies heavily on readers to fill out review forms — long or short — and disclose information about themselves. All these points tabulated through an equation and pops out a ranking number.

I recently reviewed a few stories from an assortment of news mediums for this week’s topic: Global Economy. The beauty of NewsTrust is not just that you can filter mainstream news, but that you can find, promote and circulate otherwise undiscovered citizen journalists, blogs, independent reporters’ work. I recently reviewed stories from Adbusters, Der Spiegel, Democracy Now! and this very blog (of course I filled out the disclosure form for that one).

The system is still small, with about 40 percent of its member and editors either journalists themselves or experienced in the media world somehow.

But the stories collected are usually great. And the comments on the review act as a guide to the worth of the piece and a sort of community-building that is quite academic — as opposed to the ranking system of Digg or Reddit where anything with a scandalous title usually reaches the top of the rankings fairly quickly. In other words — NewsTrust rewards good journalism. And, unfortunately, that’s lacking in the popular rankings, and sometimes in the media itself.