I could write an entire post on the last item, but I'll just say this: Stewart is perhaps the best and most important media critic we've had since A.J. Liebling.
His dissection of CNBC's Jim Cramer last night — as well as his two eight-minute pieces lampooning the so-called experts of CNBC (here and here) — will have, I predict, a major and well-deserved negative effect on the network.
NewsTrust is a social-networking tool that enables community members to submit and rate news stories on qualities such as fairness, sourcing and importance. If you've never tried it before, I encourage you to sign up and give it a whirl. I'll keep you posted on what I'm submitting this week in the hopes that you'll pitch in.
Here is what I submitted this morning. The links will take you not directly to the story but, rather, to a NewsTrust review page. From there you can go to the story and review it for yourself.
Earlier this week, I said I would post on my students' experience in using NewsTrust, a social-networking tool that lets you share and rate news stories on qualities such as accuracy, sourcing and bias.
Well, I did — but not here. My oversight. Instead, I posted a roundup on the class Web site. And here, in a bit of post-post-modernism, is what NewsTrust had to say about what my students had to say.
Following a presentation on NewsTrust by editor and frequent reviewer Mike LaBonte, my students in Reinventing the News have been finding, submitting and analyzing stories on the global economy. NewsTrust is a social-networking tool aimed at identifying and promoting quality journalism.
I asked each of my students to submit, rate and write a short critique of three different stories on the global economy — part of a "news hunt" that NewsTrust is conducting this week. I thought I'd do the assignment, too, so here are my choices.
The first, from the Christian Science Monitor, is something of a disappointment: an article about pressures on the International Monetary Fund that is so bureaucratic and top-down in its orientation that it's impossible to understand the effect of those pressures on ordinary people. Even if you grant that we shouldn't expect much from a brief overview, it's hard to know what we are supposed to take away from this story.
Moving right along, we come to a roundup in the Guardian on how plummeting oil prices are affecting four major oil-producing states — Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. As with the Monitor story, there is a top-down quality to this that leaves me a little cold. Nevertheless, it is well-executed, and provides some interesting insights into the changing fortunes of regimes that were riding high just a few months ago.
Finally, CNN offers a story on world hunger that, like the Monitor and the Guardian, is too short to get much beyond the superficial but which, unlike the Monitor and the Guardian, grabs us with the riveting, heartbreaking testimony of an aid worker who frequently travels to Haiti.
"It's horrible. They have to choose among their children," Patricia Wolff tells CNN. "They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go." The story demonstrates a key point about good journalism: even a brief report about global developments can be conveyed in human terms.
NewsTrust, which I've been following since its founding a couple of years ago (disclosure: I'm a volunteer editor), is one of the more interesting experiments in building a community around the news. If you haven't checked it out before, you should give it a look.
I'll post on what my students have been up to later this week.
For the past week students in my Web journalism class have been immersing themselves in NewsTrust, a social- networking site that bills itself as "Your guide to good journalism."
Last Wednesday Rory O'Connor, NewsTrust's editorial director, led us in a presentation and workshop, highlights of which you can see in the embedded video below. Since then, we've been posting and rating stories related to the global economy, which was NewsTrust's featured topic.
NewsTrust's strength is also its weakness. Unlike Digg, which simply allows you to vote on whether you like or don't like a story, NewsTrust asks users to rate stories on a wide range of criteria, including whether you think the news organization is reliable, how well sourced the story is, whether it's fair and whether the story offers enough context.
In all, there are 12 different criteria, each of them demanding a rating of one to five stars. Though you may leave any particular criterion blank if you choose, that's still a lot — and you haven't even gotten to writing a comment, adding tags and filling in several other forms. That's quite a bit of work.
Still, the idea is a good one. It's a way for ordinary readers — well, ordinary readers who happen to be news junkies — to re-edit the news, to judge for themselves what are the best and most important stories rather than relying on the editors of the New York Times, the BBC or what have you. Some readers who don't want to submit or even rate stories may be intrigued by the idea of tapping into the wisdom of the NewsTrust community to find news they might otherwise never see.
According to O'Connor, testing has showed that journalists and non-journalists give stories similar ratings, which suggests that the NewsTrust system, though cumbersome, actually works. Perhaps the biggest drawback at the moment is the NewsTrust demographic, which O'Connor compares to the PBS audience: well-educated, aging and very liberal. Lack of ideological balance could hinder NewsTrust from becoming the well-respected guide to which its founders aspire. They understand the problem and are hoping to come up with some solutions.
Another interesting feature is that users themselves are rated in terms of how transparent they are about their backgrounds, how often they submit and rate stories and what other users think of their ratings. This, as well as community judgments about the reliability of different news sources, all gets figured into the algorithm that comes up with a score for any given story.
According to my students' blogs, NewsTrust could be improved if it were less text-heavy and loaded more quickly.
As more people begin to use NewsTrust, its ratings should become more useful. I've submitted and reviewed several stories and felt like I was shouting into the wind, as no one else rated them. I do think it would be interesting if there were some way of knowing how many other people had at least read the story.
Social networking is the hottest trend in media today. By trying to combine social networking with serious journalism, the founders of NewsTrust have hit upon one of the more promising experiments in online journalism.
