BuzzMachine

I have been criminally negligent in not linking to and blogging about NewsTrust.net, the laudable effort by Fabrice Florin and Rory O’Connor to get the public to rate news sources. I missed linking to the launch — my fault — then wanted to spend more time getting my head around the thing.

Fabrice and Rory’s effort is much-needed in our new, loose, distributed media world: They want to answer the question, Whom do we trust? Ratings, reputation, and trust are critically important elements in an open medium where all can and do publish. But, of course, it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer anymore; we each trust different sources for different information and different reasons: I may trust you for your music reviews but not your scientific explanations. But before I know you, I still need to know where best to start when looking for or judging information. And there is also a benefit in judging sources, to improve them or make them more responsive or keep them honest.

And so NewsTrust set about having us rate stories and sources. When I first heard about their effort, I liked the idea but also cautioned that the self-selecting nature of having anyone rate whatever they want would skew the value of the results; it will amplify agendas as one person comes in to praise those with whom he agrees and the next comes in to blast those with whom she disagrees. Fabrice and Rory worked to fix that by having juries of judges — for example, classes of journalism students — judge articles assigned to them. But it’s still the case that anyone can rate anything.

So the issue remains that in a small set of judges, there is an almost-inevitable skewing of the judgments. Fabrice and Rory tried extremely hard to recruit people from all ends of the political spectrum, but the early days of NewsTrust clearly lean left: The top-rated magazine is Mother Jones; the no. 3-rated newspaper is The Independent; the no. 1-rated neutral source is NPR; The New York Review of Books is no. 3 under magazines and no. 8 under all sources; Juan Cole is no. 24. And the ratings show a scientific bent: The Union of Concerned Scientists is the No. 1 news source of all; New Scientist, Science, and Scientific American all make the top list.

This is not an intractable issue. As more people use NewsTrust, its worldview is likely to widen (though it is also possible it could contract). What that says is that volume matters; there is a critical mass of both the numbers of judges and the variety of their viewpoints that is necessary to make NewsTrust valuable; until then, it is the view of a small crowd and in an endeavor such as this, a small crowd is less wise than a large crowd. That is the chicken-and-egg issue facing NewsTrust: It will be more valuable when it has more judges, but it will have more judges when it is more valuable.

There are a few solutions to this. The first is that lots of you should go to NewsTrust and start rating stories and sources; the more the better.

But until then, I am coming to think that we should view NewsTrust differently: as a recommendation service. It is Digg with a difference: the people there explain why they like what they like and try to judge news and sources on a scale. In that sense, it is a group blog with one aim: not life stories but links. And that is valuable.

I’d find it more valuable if I could sort those recommendations by worldview. As in the ill-fated LA Times wikitorial, I suggested that they fork the effort: pit one side against the other so we can judge the best of both views. I’d like to see the stories that liberals and conservatives each consider the best on various issues.

And along the way, I think, the end-product NewsTrust started to create — data on trustworthiness in media — will be a byproduct that will grow over time if more and more people use the service.