Now that the election primary season is over and the national conventions are weeks away, journalists have time to do more than simply follow breaking news from the campaign trail.
We now have time to evaluate it.
The week of June 13, The Poynter Institute is teaming up with PolitiFact (a project of Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly) and NewsTrust to review the media’s political coverage. We hope to find the best journalism on the topic of “Media and Politics.”
Here is your chance to review the journalistic coverage you are consuming. For the next week, we’d like to encourage you to participate in our news hunt by signing up for NewsTrust. Each day you can review and/or submit two or three stories or videos you find online.
Throughout the week you can also view the top-rated “Media and Politics” stories reviewed by NewsTrust users. (Here’s the RSS feed if you want to add it to your reader). To the left of this text, you’ll see a widget featuring a constantly updated report of the three articles NewsTrust users rated best in their reviews.
Displayed in the widget (which you can embed on your own blog or Web site), you can see:
- The article title
- Where the article was published
- When it was published
- The type of content (news analysis, opinion, press release, etc.)
- A brief user summary of or commentary on the article
- How many stars users have awarded to it (and its average rating)
- A link to other reviews
- A direct link to the review page for you to review it yourself
Here is an example of what a basic story review looks like. Click on the image to start the news hunt and review your first story:
Poynter’s interest in quality journalism, PolitiFact’s search for truth in the presidential campaigns, combine with NewsTrust’s functionality to rate online content for its quality, will help identify some of the best practices in political coverage this primary season. We need your help, though.
Join us on the news hunt and, for the next week, help us review our industry’s work. Next week, we’ll report back what we find.
Additional resources
- An introduction to NewsTrust: Assessing Users’ Trust of the News
- Results from NewTrust’s most recent News Hunt with The Huffington Post on John McCain coverage.
