Welcome to our NewsTrust.net Blog!

Here’s where you’ll find the latest community news, as well as review tips, featured topics, cool new features and special projects. Please chime in and add your comments to the posts on this blog, to let us know what you think.

Our social news network keeps growing. A year after we launched our beta site, we now have thousands of reviewers who rate the news based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. We’re all learning a lot from this citizen knowledge base — as well as becoming more discriminating news readers in the process.

Our staff has grown as well, and I’m pleased to introduce two new team members, who are joining us this month:

• David Cohn - Contributing Editor
• Tish Grier - Community Developer

David and Tish will post here regularly, to share the latest news about NewsTrust.net, and spearhead discussions. Other members of our fine editorial and engineering teams will also contribute regularly to this blog:

• Rory O'Connor - Editorial Director
• David Fox - Technology Director
• Kaizar Campwala -  Associate Editor
• Adam Florin -  Web Engineer
• Subramanya Sastry - Web Engineer
• Leo Romero - Community Organizer

In coming weeks, we’ll also invite our advisors, hosts and other veterans of our community to post their thoughts on this blog. We encourage you all to comment frequently, as well as post your own suggestions on our feedback page.

We all look forward to growing our social network with you, so that more people can find and share good journalism online. If you haven’t already, be sure to spread the word in your community.

Looks like an exciting year ahead for us, and we’re working on a range of partnerships and new features to help expand this promising new form of online collaboration.

Speak to you soon, and many thanks for your wonderful contributions to our cause!

Fabrice Florin - Executive Director, NewsTrust.net

P.S.: To find more about NewsTrust, check our our about page. For help, check our FAQ. If you plan to comment on this blog, please check our terms of service.

Comments

[BobSchacht]

Could Newstrust track final ratings by author? That is, keep a running account of news story authors including
*Author name
*Date of first article
*Number of rated articles
*Average final score of rated articles
*Minimum final score of rated articles
*Maximum final score of rated articles

That way, over time, it would be possible for us to gain a sense of who the best journalists really are.

Even better, if the database could include their average final rating on each of the rated features of the article. So, for example, we could get a sense of which journalists tend to use a lot of sources, and which are mainly purveyors of unsourced opinion, which sources tend to be negative, and which sources tend to be most positive.

Annually, you could even grant a prize of some kind for "Best overall rating," Best sourced news, etc.

Bob in HI

[Juliet Sallette]

Fabrice

I love the Blog. Kudo's to you and the News Trust team on another successful product launch. Keep up the good work. I enjoy the new additions. I now look at articles differently, thanks to Newstrust. Since joining Newstrust, my personal writing style has improved. Thanks for making such an incredible product.
Juliet Sallette

[Fabrice Florin]

Hello Bob and Juliet,

Thanks so much for your kind words and good advice about NewsTrust.

I'm delighted to hear you're getting good value from our service.

Bob, we're planning to start keeping track of individual authors later in the year. We will post author overview pages very much in line with what you're requesting above, and they will look a bit like our current source pages, but with new data that's also in the works.

Your idea of awarding prizes to the best authors and publications also makes very good sense. We're going to think very seriously about this one, once we think that our overall rating service is reliable enough to make such definitive judgment calls (note that all our source ratings are still considered preliminary for now, until we refine our review forms and audit our data).

Thanks again for your inspiring feedback!

Anyone else care to comment about how we could improve our service?

[Norman Rogers]

I'm confused about the blog. Where is it? I can't find it.

[tish grier]

Hi Norman,

well, if you're leaving a comment, you're already on the blog!

also, looking at the upper right corner, you'll see the word "blog,"--letting readers know they've left the home page and are on the blog.

[Lee Callister]

This looks great, Fab. A good way to let people know what you are all about.

The range of stories you now cover is impressive. It's not just a guide to good journalism. It has become a place to find the important stories of the day.

I think the moderated discussions you have planned will attract a lot of interest.