NewsTrust Brings a New Algorithm to News
Important Details: How good is that story you read this morning? Was it clear, fair, balanced? Did you learn something? Is it something you want to pass along to friends and associates? With the launch of its new site, NewsTrust aims to harness the judgment, if not the wisdom, of crowds of readers to answer those questions on the news of the day. NewsTrust, at first glance, looks like numerous other news aggregation sites, Google News and Topix, for instance. Long columns of stories, categorized by topic, cascade down the page. This first generation of news aggregation has taken hold, raising numerous questions about which stories rise to the top, why, how long do they stay here, and what’s the relative places of mainstream media and new voices. NewsTrust targets all these questions and comes up with a new solution: deep rankings of stories, their writers and their source publications.
"We’re celebrating good journalism," says NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin. "We want to help people become more discriminating readers and viewers." He cites the media wars and the lowered public trust of news media in general as a reason he established the site and settled on trust as its foremost principle. "The public doesn’t know if it can trust the news media. The more [publishers] engage the audience, the more they build trust."
If trust is Florin’s goal, his layered system of rankings is what under girds the idea. There will be at least four kinds of rankings:
- Rate a Story: Become a member of NewsTrust and you can then start ranking stories. Choose from either a quick, six-question set (good story; informative; well-sourced; fair; big picture; trust publication), giving one to five stars, of the full 12-question set.
- Rate a Source: Using a 5-star-system, members also rate overall sources (NY Times, RedState, Marketwatch, etc.). Here NewsTrust is trying to apply the real-world smarts of judging not just a story, but understanding the overall credibility of its publisher.
- Rate a Writer: Not yet enabled, this layer aims to be an in-between one, between story and source, getting a sense of the trustworthiness of reporters/writers over time.
- Rate a Rater: NewsTrust comes down to how good its raters are, so it is offering a rate-a-rater function, trying still another check-and-balance on the system. Raters also have "profile" pages" — the MySpace-ization of news — and those wanting to get deeply into the product can see the raters’ relative experience, topical knowledge and bio.
Those rankings collectively create the algorithm that determines prominence of a story on the site. NewsTrust editors are seeding the site with stories now; over time as readers submit stories — another social networking/news idea — those submitted stories presumably will grow in prominence.
Florin, a former Macromedia executive, has been developing NewsTrust for 18 months, largely self-funding it. He serves as executive director of the company, which is based in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco. As it moves beyond its first days — 700 active reviewers, 2000 members within the first week — he’s looking to the next stages for his fledgling non-profit company. He’s in discussions with two large metro papers interested in using the NewsTrust system on their own sites for their own content, essentially importing a reader scoring system. He sees potential in working with numerous traditional content publishers, including video and audio creators, with the intention "to improve journalism" and to offer tools that help the new active audience engage. "By 2010, I’d like to have nine million monthly uniques," he says.
But don’t lots of people just want to read, not take their time scoring and ranking? Florin says he believes that will be the case, estimating that maybe one in 20 NewsTrust visitors will choose to rank stories as the site grows. All visitors, though, he says, get the value out of the rankings.
- On what makes NewsTrust different: Compared to social network news site Digg, it’s more than "thumbs-up, thumbs-down. People on Digg have welcomed us because they’ve grown concerned about the quality of their feed."
- On gaming the system: NewsTrust asks for raters’ real names and verifies they are who they say they are. Florin says the "rating the raters" system" will help make it a self-policing community.
- On business model: 1) Advertising; 2) Subscriptions to "premium services" to come and donations; 3) license fees from partners using the technology.
In Outsell’s Opinion: NewsTrust is an ambitious idea. In focusing on "trust," it opens up a good, new debate. After all, media trustworthiness has long been under assault; Internet distribution of news has brought more confusion to questions of sourcing and credibility. If NewsTrust gets scale, through its own viral growth and/or through news company partnership, it will be a fascinating learning lab. Those who have worked in the industry know what "news judgment" means to those in the trade — making the right or wrong calls is everything. What will happen as that news judgment pool expands will be a learning experience for journalists and readers both.
No doubt it it will be Internet activists who first take to the site. NewsTrust’s success, as in many Internet start-ups, will be in time-to-market and in attracting a large and diverse set of raters to give meaning to the basic "trust" notion.
In the end, Outsell believes that trust may be a valuable building block, but the product itself is what will drive its success or failure. If NewsTrust really surfaces new news sources that readers find valuable — that strange sense of web discovery that is rapidly replacing our sense of print medium serendipity — it can succeed. If the experience goes beyond the News 1.0 aggregation displays of endless lists of stories, it may find readers passing on its URL to friends. Already, in making clear that the source of a story is as important as the story itself, it underlines a truth of the Internet age that needs reinforcing. The fact that it displays many sources on its source listing pages is quite helpful, and a useful aggregation in itself.
For news companies, it’s at least an opportunity to learn and to watch, and maybe to partner. Florin’s site provides a PowerPoint slide set, describing the service, which is a good introduction and idea starter for internal discussions.
We are into an era where news stories can and will be judged, just as advertising increasingly is, by metrics. These metrics of course are qualitative, which is what makes most sense in the field. "Effectiveness" of a story of course is hard to relate to dollars and cents, even on Wall Street. But as good readers everywhere will tell: they know it when they see it.