The Role of Media Literacy in Saving Journalism

I've just started reading Charlie Beckett's new book "Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World" and before the end of the first chapter I came across a passage that made me think of NewsTrust.

Charlie writes in the final paragraph of the introductory chapter:

"And finally I want to reappraise the idea of Media Literacy. There is no hope for Networked Journalism if the practitioners and the public are not equipped for the task... For Networked Journalism to become a reality anywhere, it is about the public. It is about giving the people - formerly known as the audience - the skills and the resources to be participants in the process, to teach people how to take part in the news media, and to understand how it works. This is much more than the practical task of media studies. It is also about giving people the resources to adopt a critical engagement with journalism."

Of course, we couldn't agree more here at NewsTrust. To that end, we are planning to extend NewsTrust to include more news literacy tools in coming months. But, as Charlie points out, this is much more the traditional 'media studies.' It's not just about understanding the difference between opinion and fact, but calling a news article out, if it isn't up to par. It is about critical engagement in the daily news.

A Look Back at Middle East Stories - News Hunt Results

Last week the NewsTrust community searched for good journalism on the Middle East, in partnership with the Council of Foreign Relations, Global Voices, and Link TV. Here are some of the highlights of our News Hunt:

Top Rated Stories
Since we began our News Hunt, our search yielded 79 new submissions on this topic, from a variety of mainstream and independent sources. Here are the top rated stories for this week's news hunt:

Mainstream News Sources

• Negotiating isn't appeasement - Los Angeles Times
• Bounties a Bust in Hunt for Al-Qaeda - Washington Post
• Palestinian-American Reflects on Israel - National Public Radio
• Hasty truce with Moqtada al-Sadr tests his sway in Baghdad stronghold - Christian Science Monitor
• Low hopes for Bush Mideast trip - Christian Science Monitor
• Jerusalem Diary: Monday 12 May - BBC News

Independent News Sources

• The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - Council on Foreign Relations
• Losing Lebanon - American Prospect
• Your Independence Is Our Nakba - LinkTV
• Israel at 60: Zionism's Fatal Flaw - Religion Dispatches
• Baghdad's Other Power Struggle - TruthDig
• Palestine: Sixty Years of Al Nakba - Global Voices

Journalism on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

We began our news hunt looking at CFR.org's Israeli-Palestinian Crisis Guide. This multimedia presentation provides historical context for the conflict across several axes- territorial, diplomatic, and international. The guide a highly informative and balanced resource to better understanding the news coming out of the region today.

Our focus on the Middle East coincided with the 60th Anniversary of Israel's founding, a time celebrated inside Israel but mourned by many Palestinian Arabs as Al Nakba, 'The Catastrophe'. Many of the top rated stories, especially from internationally focused sources, focused on this counter-narrative. Reviewer and Global Voices editor Jillian York explains about one highly rated Global Voices post on the anniversary "gives the Palestinian Arabic-language perspective on Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations. Several bloggers with different viewpoints are sourced, making the article fairly balanced." Long time NewsTrust reviewer Jim Lang found value in the BBC's Jerusalem Diary series, commenting that the Monday, May 12th entry was "a moving story reflecting the human side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is similar to stories that I have heard directly from both Israelis and Palestinians who in spite of their differences eschew further violence and long for peace." NPR presented an interesting reflection on the Palestinian story in a radio interview with a Christian, Palestinian-American woman whose family was driven out of their home in 1948.

To commemorate the anniversary, President Bush kicked off his Middle East tour with a visit to Israel. Addressing the Knesset in Tel Aviv, he indirectly commented on Presidential candidate Barack Obama's calls for greater diplomacy with Iran. Bush drew a historical parallel with Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazi's in the 1930's, a comparison that Peter Scoblic rebuffs in an LA Times opinion that was the highest rated mainstream story on this topic. NewsTrust reviewer Chris Finnie distills Scoblic's argument, commenting "there's nothing like historical fact to show philosophical inconsistencies and what works or doesn't. True appeasement has a poor record. However, as this article ably argues, negotiation on the basis of enlightened self-interest for both parties can and does work. Heated rhetoric aside, it doesn't indicate weakness, but reasonableness."

The Middle East constitutes a large and diverse area, and the NewsTrust community reviewed stories on other issues such as the complex conflict in Lebanon, media censorship in Egypt, and the continued strife in Iraq. Check out more good journalism on the Middle East coverage on our Middle East Topic Page.

Thanks to Our Partners!
We would like to thank our partners for their outstanding contributions to the Middle East news hunt. From the Council of Foreign Relations, Eben Kaplan helped the NewsTrust community gain a better understanding of the news from the region with his excellent reviews and story submissions. Thanks Eben. The contributors, editors, and readers at Global Voices brought an international perspective that we hope to see much more of. Thanks to Solana Larson and Amira Al Hussaini for organizing the collaboration and taking the time to inform the Global Voices community. Finally, a big thank you to our Middle East topic host, Mark Monday. Mark has been a long time reviewer on NewsTrust, and we're privileged that he volunteers his time and expertise on this and related subjects on NewsTrust. If you would like to find out about hosting a topic on NewsTrust, email us! Hope to you see you all back on the site soon -- be sure to join our upcoming news hunts!

Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine

Featured Topic: The Internet and Society - Join our News Hunt

This week, our featured topic is The Internet and Society, with a focus on how the net is changing the way we work, play and communicate with each other. For this 'news hunt,' we're collaborating with Frontline and journalism students at Stanford University. For an in-depth perspective, we invite you to watch today's featured story: Growing up Online, Frontline's public TV documentary about the cultural impact of the web on 'digital natives.'

Here's an excerpt from the Frontline intro page (to view the documentary, click 'Watch Online'):

 

In Growing Up Online, Frontline takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

 

"They're able to have a private space, even while they're still at home. They're able to communicate with their friends and have an entire social life outside of the purview of their parents, without actually having to leave the house." (link)

Once you've watched this Frontline documentary, we urge you to read and review other news and opinions about this fascinating and important topic on our Internet topic page.

 

NewsTrust at the Googleplex

Want to find out more about NewsTrust? Check out this video from our Google Tech Talk. A couple weeks ago, our executive director, Fabrice Florin, gave a presentation to Google employees about NewsTrust. This is a great way to get a full overview of what's going on behind the scenes in our social news network.

This Google Tech Talk was called 'How to Find Good Journalism Online' and took place Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 2:00 pm PT on the Google campus in Mountain View. NewsTrust executive director Fabrice Florin presented an overview of our nonprofit social news site devoted to quality journalism. This 45 minute presentation is followed by a Q&A and discussion of best practices in this new field. (we also held a salon on good journalism, but that is not included in this video)

This presentation shows how NewsTrust aggregates its live feeds of quality news and opinions on a wide range of topics (e.g.: Elections, Environment), based on reviews by experienced journalists and citizen reviewers - with ratings weighted by expertise. We also demonstrate our unique approach to helping people tell good journalism apart from misinformation. Our news literacy service helps people rate the news based on quality, not just popularity - by evaluating fairness, evidence, sourcing, context and other core principles of journalism. The project’s mission is to enable citizens to make more informed decisions. For more information, check out the Powerpoint presentation.

We would like to express our deepest thanks to the Google employees who helped put this event together, in particular David 'Pablo' Cohn, Mike Dixon and Akash Parikh, to name but a few -- as well as and Robert Healy and his team, who put this video together. Many of them are pictured in the group shot below. We're very grateful to them all for their generous support of our cause -- as well as to Google, Inc., who made a generous grant to support NewsTrust with online advertising, to raise awareness for our public service.

(Pictured from left to right: David Fox, Richard Gingras, Andre Rohe, Mike Dixon, Fabrice Florin, David 'Pablo' Cohn, Akash Parikh, Kaizar Campwala and Stephanie Savell - click on photo to enlarge)

Lastly, if you use Google, we encourage you to add our NewsTrust Gadget on Google's personalized page service: iGoogle. It's a great way to get our feeds of top-rated news and opinions on the world's most popular search site. Give it a try -- and add the NewsTrust Gadget to your own iGoogle page.

Craig Newmark and NewsTrust

A New York Times profile of Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, highlighted many of the good deeds Newmark has dedicated himself towards.

I've had the opportunity to speak with Craig a few times and can attest that he is humble and dedicated to doing the right thing as he comes off.

We are very honored and pleased that NewsTrust is one of the great organizations that Craig supports.

From the article:

"The list of good-government and good-journalism Web sites Mr. Newmark is involved with — sometimes financially, but more often as adviser and advocate in the Silicon Valley world — speak for themselves: factcheck.org, sunlightfoundation.com, PRWatch.org, NewsTrust.net, publicintegrity.org."

You're very welcome to review this article on NewsTrust.

Featured Topic - The Middle East - Join our News Hunt

This week's featured topic is the Middle East, with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the recent relapse of violence in Lebanon. Our partners for this 'news hunt' are the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR.org), Global Voices, and LinkTV. We're delighted to be joining forces with these fine partners to find good journalism about this complex issue, which impacts not just the Middle East, but the entire world.

Think of this 'news hunt' as a scavenger hunt for good journalism on the Middle East. This week, we invited news professionals, content experts and concerned citizens to join forces with us and find the best journalism on the web on the Middle East, using the NewsTrust review service. In a week, we'll announce the results of our news hunt on our blog and newsletters, and prominently feature the top stories, sources and reviewers on NewsTrust.

Better Understanding the Crisis
Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian crisis can be difficult. The long history of the conflict is intertwined with issues of colonialism, the Cold War, and the greater region's vast energy resources. The Council of Foreign Relations has created an Israeli-Palestinian Crisis Guide that we recommend as a first step in better understanding the many dimensions of the situation. Beginning with a timeline video that traces the conflict from the British colonial era to the present, the guide frames the crisis from a variety of perspectives. For example, an interactive territorial map tackles issues such as water resources, the Palestinian refugee camps, and the status of Jerusalem. The guide manages to go in-depth but still remain accessible to non-experts, and has already been highly rated on NewsTrust.

Independence Day or Al Nakba?
This week marks the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, an event many Arabs refer to as 'Al-Nakba' ('the catastrophe'). With dignitaries such as U.S. President George W. Bush visiting the region, we'll see news and opinion on both perspectives of this anniversary. Jamal Dajani, producer of LinkTV's excellent Mosaic program, offers his view of the Palestinian perspective, entitled "Your Independence Is Our Nakba", in his regular video commentary on The Mosaic Intelligence Report.

Voices from the Region
Reporting on the power and politics of the Middle East often fails to capture the realities on the ground. This problem has been amplified as economically squeezed news organizations are forced to shut down their foreign bureaus. However, the Internet has enabled new kinds of local reporting to partially fill this media void. NewsTrust is proud to be teaming up with the bloggers and journalists who contribute to the Global Voices project to offer local perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa. Check out their posts on the NewsTrust Global Voices page.

Get involved
Now it's your turn. Help us find the best journalism on this important topic, by joining forces with our partners, to review and submit stories about the Middle East. If you haven't already, please sign up to review some of the recommended stories below -- then come back here to help us find the best news coverage on the Middle East. To quickly submit new stories on this topic, be sure to get our bookmarklet.

Israel, Middle East, Palestine

Join our News Hunts!

Here at NewsTrust, we've started weekly 'News Hunts', a great new way to find quality news and opinions on important issues we all care about - in partnership with news providers and educational organizations.

A 'News Hunt' is a scavenger hunt for good journalism. For each weeklong News Hunt, we pick a hot news topic like the Environment, the Presidential Election or the Middle East - in collaboration with that week's media or educational partner. We then invite news professionals, concerned citizens, educators and students to join forces with us and find the best journalism on the web for that topic, using the NewsTrust review service. A week later, we announce the results of our News Hunt on our blog and newsletters, and prominently feature the top stories, sources and reviewers on the NewsTrust.net website.

We've been organizing these News Hunts in collaboration with some great media partners, from the Huffington Post to PBS and the Scientific American -- and we're now discussing similar partnerships with some major news providers, to be announced very soon.

For example, here are some of the News Hunts we have conducted recently:
* Middle East - with CFR.org, Global Voices, and LinkTV (May 12)
* John McCain - with Huffington Post and OffTheBus (June 2)
* Media and Politics - with Poynter Institute and PolitiFact (June 16)
* Presidential Election - with PBS Engage and P.O.V. (June 30)

To support these collaborations, our partners typically feature our top-rated news widgets, which act as a scoreboard for our 'news hunts' -- and can extend their news coverage with other related stories from trusted sources. Our partners also add our review buttons next to featured articles on their sites (near Digg or Facebook buttons), to help promote their best work and get civil, structured feedback from our reviewers -- based on journalistic quality, not just popularity.

Besides helping each other become more savvy news consumers, this is a great way to grow our community by engaging our friends and colleagues, as well as other NewsTrust members and partners, in these fascinating quests for quality information. We always end up discovering great journalism and new sources of insights together.

To give you a sense on how News Hunts work, check the case study below, which outlines our collaboration with Scientific American and the University of Nevada at Reno, to find good journalism on the Environment.

If you work at a large news-related site or journalism school, and think your organization might like to participate in an upcoming news hunt, please check our partners page and contact us about a possible partnership. And if you have your own blog or personal web page, check our widget page to see how you can add any of our free news widgets to your site -- it only takes a few minutes!

In the meantime, we invite you all to join our News Hunts, which we will announce on this blog, our home page and email newsletters throughout the year.

Happy news hunting!

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NEWS HUNT CASE STUDY:
Scientific American and University of Nevada on the Environment

In April 2008, NewsTrust organized a 'News Hunt' on the Environment, in partnership with Scientific American and the University of Nevada, Reno.

Here are some of the steps we took together during this weeklong collaboration.

* NewsTrust Promotion
To kick off this Environment News Hunt, we promoted it prominently as a featured topic on our home page, in our daily email newsletters, as well as on our blog.

* Scientific American Promotion
At the same time, Scientific American promoted this News Hunt on their home page, and invited their readers to join forces with us to find the web's best stories on the Environment in this project overview by one of their editors, Christopher Mims.

* Scientific American Widgets and Button
Scientific American also added the NewsTrust Environment widget and our review buttons next to all articles related to the environment on their site, as shown on this sample page.

* University of Nevada Promotion
The Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno also participated in this News Hunt, and two journalism professors, Donica Mensing and David Rye, invited about thirty students to review and submit environmental stories on NewsTrust -- as outlined on the UNR site.

* Student Blog Posts on NewsTrust
And a few of the UNR students were also invited to blog about their experience on the NewsTrust site, where they shared how findings from our news hunt supported their own initiatives to help Reno, Nevada become a green city.

* NewsTrust Top-Rated News Feed
Throughout our partnership, our website and widgets offered a live scoreboard of our top-rated news and opinions on the Environment - dozens of great news stories were reviewed everyday in our Environment news feed.

* News Hunt Results
A week later, on Earth Day, we shared the news hunt results of this collective search for good journalism, on our blog.

In just a week, our 'Environment News Hunt' yielded many new submissions on this topic, from a variety of mainstream and independent sources. We found some fascinating stories, which we might not have discovered otherwise, and this collective News Hunt made us all more informed citizens. More importantly, we all had a great time working together, and we learned a lot from each other in the process.

UPDATED on July 15, with links to most recent partnerships.

Featured Topic: Presidential Election 2008 - A look back at U.S. Economy

With the May 6 Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, we return to U.S. Presidential Elections 2008.  With tens of millions spent and record voter turnout, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to battle for the Democratic nomination in the few primaries that remain.  Meanwhile, in recent weeks, McCain has turned to fund-raising and a ""It's Time for Action" tour, campaigning among working-class and poor white and black Americans. We hope you'll look for stories not just on the horse race, but the issues and submit examples of good journalism on the topic.  And, please remember to review those found by others, adding comments about the stories' strengths and weaknesses.

In a news analysis, "Options Dwindling for Clinton," (NewsTrust reviews) a story featured story this week, New York Times' reporter Adam Nagourney writes,

In this case, a split was not a draw. -- Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination.

After Texas,  the Wall Street Journal's blog had speculated on Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," a plan for Republicans to switch registrations and vote for Clinton so as to extend the race.  While there was a report in the Indianapolis Star 'Hardcore' Republicans voting Democrat (See Reviews), any such attempt at strategic voting didn't seem to be much in play. 

As Jim Sleeper over at TPM Cafe awaited the results of the Democratic primary, he suggested the way to combat a Clinton surge was to come out for affirmative action based on class, not race.

April 23 to 27, Chris Finnie and I  co-hosted U.S. Presidential Elections 2008.  On the heels of the Pennsylvania primary, we were assisted by a slew of hosts, members and staff who submitted and reviewed stories.  While many of the initial stories were on the horse race, our community soon found stories on more substantive subjects, such as April 29th's news analysis on election reform,  "In a 6-to-3 Vote, Justices Uphold a Voter ID Law," by the  NYT's Linda Green  (reviews).

Chris provided me with some insight on what she gained from co-hosting:

I was surprised at how much I learned. I fancied myself fairly knowledgeable about politics. After all, I have been heavily involved in the political arena for about 4 years now. I've been interviewed by two of the journalists whose stories I posted  and quoted several times by one. But digging to find stories, reading, and reviewing as many as I have, did deepen my understanding of a topic I thought I knew well. In a few cases, I was able to add a personal perspective to some of my reviews--which I hope gave NewsTrust readers a unique angle on the stories.

A look back at top-rated stories on the U.S. Economy

As we moved on to the economy, our  co-host was Dale Penn.  Interest in Presidential Elections 2008 persisted, as members found  stories which covered both topics  such as "Gas tax follies" by NYT economics columnist Paul Krugman. Among the reviews, was one by host Stephen Pizzo, who wrote,

Any politician who promises to do anything to make gas cheaper should be sent packing for that reason alone. The one thing that has held back alternative (renewable) sources of energy is the economics of the situation. When compared to the price of petroleum products everything else costs more. So we are not about to make the changes we must make until the price of petroleum energy sources is high enough to make the alternatives attractive and economically viable. Lowering gas prices will simply create another fool's paradise for another few years until a real energy crisis hits, and then it will be too late. McCain and Clinton are simply trying to buy votes with this nonsense. It's a bankrupt policy being put forth for the most corrupt of reasons.

The top rated story was A Feeble Recovery: The fundamental economic weaknesses of the 2001-07 expansion, a special report by Josh Bivens and John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute.

Coming Up in May: Join our "news hunts" on the Middle East, the Internet, Media & Politics

Here at NewsTrust, we're now doing 'news hunts' weekly in collaboration with media partners like the Scientific American, Global Voices, Huffington Post, Link TV, Mother Jones.  And we're discussing similar partnerships with some major news providers, to be announced soon.

Next week, if you're interested in world news,  we'll be covering  the Middle East, with the help of our partners the Council on Foreign Relations, Global Voices and Link TV. And then we'll move on to other featured topics and collaborations:

• The Internet (and its impact on 'Digital Natives') - with Frontline and students from Stanford University (May 19)
• Presidential Elections 2008 - with the Huffington Post  (May 26)
• Media and Politics - with the Poynter Institute (June 2)

Host a topic on NewsTrust

If you're a host, interested in co-hosting any topic, from either the list above or your own favorites, drop  us line at <hosts@newstrust.net>. If you're not a host already, you can become one. Review often, write comments based on journalistic quality and tell us something about yourself in your member profile.  Kaizar, Tish and I will on the lookout for potential hosts as we validate new reviewers.  And, you can always drop us a line and nominate yourself.

Meanwhile we'll be looking forward to your reviews on Presidential Elections 2008.

NewsTrust.Net Hosts Salons at Yahoo and Google

Apologies for not posting last week, but as we'll explain below, the NewsTrust team was pleasantly busy.

Our first big moment in the week was at Google, where we held a NewsTrust Salon with Google employees who are concerned with issues of news and information and ensuring that quality content gets highlighted as the digital revolution moves forward.

For those who don't know - a NewsTrust Salon is when a group of people gather in a room to read and evaluate the same news article. Here's a video of our SF Salon. These Salon's are great at demonstrating the civic engagement that occurs when interfacing with NewsTrust's media literacy tools. Even the most experienced of journalists often say they read articles closer when they are using NewsTrust to rate the story and learn from hearing about how others went about reviewing the same article. It is an educating experience.

The Salon went very well and we are pleased to know that so many people at Google are concerned with the future of quality journalism. Google News is a powerful tool - and we are big fans of it here at NewsTrust, but we also believe that the stories that are highlighted on Google News need to be placed in context. What stories are accurate, fair and well reported? So far there is no algorithm that can detect these qualities.

Google wasn't the only search engine giant that is showing a growing concern for the future of journalism. This week Yahoo hosted a "Journalism That Matters" conference, which was attended by various leaders in the journalism industry. While there, NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin gave a presentation to the entire conference of about 150 journalists and journalism educators on NewsTrust and the goal we have of using web 2.0 tools to find and highlight quality content.

While at Yahoo we held another Salon with journalists from the San Jose Mercury News, AFP and others. In fact, it turned into one of the better salons I've attended because the article we were reviewing was an AFP article - and a representative of the news agency was there to give his perspective. The reviews weren't all fantastic, but the criticisms of the article was constructive  - and was received as such. While it might have been a bitter pill to swallow for the AFP reporter who was part of the Salon - we were all educated as a result. The reviewers were able to learn about the difficulties of reporting on certain issues and the AFP representative learned a bit about what information readers are looking for.

The point is: Conversation occurred and as a result understanding could follow. If we had gathered the same group to talk about the same article without using NewsTrust to guide their thoughts, I'm not certain it would have been as constructive of a conversation. To me, this signifies that NewsTrust is moving in the right direction - towards civil dialogs and education.

For more of the Yahoo event see Fabrice's pictures on Flickr or watch the video below where Fabrice and Kaizar share their thoughts about the event.