Newstrust, the online community that rates the quality of mainstream an independent news stories, just debuted several new features with its site redesign. I’ll confess that until now I hadn’t explored this site much because it seemed too cluttered and involved too much of a learning curve. But with the redesign, I think it’s much more inviting and accessible.
Here are a few new features I find especially intriguing:
New ratings:“We now track quality ratings separately from popularity.” I think this is a big advantage over the leading news-sharing sites like Digg and Reddit. Although it’s possible to game or skew both “quality” and “popularity” ratings, popularity is probably easier to game, so I think it’s helpful to separate them out.
Trust-o-meters:“We’ve replaced star ratings with our own quality rating icons.” I must confess I don’t recall what Newstrust’s old start ratings looked like, but I definitely find the trust-o-meter display very helpful. It offers, at a glance, a quick average of all reviews for a story (overall and by specific review criteria) — but you can also dig down into individual reviews (which in turn offer an overall score plus ratings for specific criteria). For me, this visual presentation really works well.
Quick review form:“We’ve made it simpler and faster, with different questions for [reviewing] news and opinion [stories].” One thing I do recall from my early, limited experiments with Newstrust is that the review process used to take a lot of effort. The new form is indeed streamlined and user-friendly. I especially like that when you click on a story headline, the article pops up in a new tab and the review form is off to the side in a pop-up window.
More review forms: “We also offer full and advanced forms, with new questions for expert reviewers.” This sounds like a great idea — but so far I haven’t really seen how expert reviews are presented vs. regular reviews on Newstrust. That might just be a factor of the mix of stories I checked out there today, I’ll keep looking. (If anyone can shed more light on this, please comment below.)
…But from the perspective of news orgs, the most intriguing feature on NewsTrust is its source ratings page. I don’t think this is new, but it’s very useful — especially coupled with the trust-o-meter ratings. This is where you can get an overall sense of what Newstrust reviewers think of the quality of specific news orgs’ coverage. For instance, here are the source ratings for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Rolling Stone, Union of Concerned Scientists, The Smirking Chimp, The Daily show, NPR, and AFP.
…Which brings up another strength of NewsTrust: They’re not just looking at mainstream news orgs, and they’re not even limiting their ratings to news orgs at all. Instead, this site recognizes that news comes from many places, including blogs, comedy shows, and advocacy groups. It’s interesting to compare how all kinds of news venues inspire trust — or not.
