As Fabrice already noted, we had a fantastic group of journalists, academics, concerned citizens and thinkers over last Friday at our first NewsTrust Salon on good journalism. The goal of the night was to discuss "what makes good journalism?" Or more accurately - how do you find news you can trust?
We started the night off with brief introductions and answering the question: What are three news sources you trust. It was interesting to hear several people mention the Economist and the Daily Show among some of the usual suspects of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
It was Howard Rheingold who first brought up that for him, more important than what news sources he trusts is how he gets his news - which is through various RSS feeds. Others followed and I myself have to admit, Google Reader has changed the way I read the news. In future salons that might be a follow up question, since so many people are getting their news through social means like Facebook or Digg. I wonder if people trust news they get from one social media source more than others?
After the introductions Fabrice went into a power point presentation which he will slowly reveal here on this blog, one post/slide at a time - which explains all the intricacies that NewsTrust.net offers. Time and again, after people watch the presentation they often say: gosh, I didn't realize you were doing so much. Some of the features on NewsTrust are hidden - but we want to bring them to the surface and that is part of the reason why we held this salon.
Next we broke up into groups of 4-6 people to review a story together. It was through this process that those in attendance were able to get a real sense of what NewsTrust does - it forces a reader to step back and examine what they are reading and how it is presented to them. After 15-20 minutes of reviewing a story we came back to share the experience of rating a story on NewsTrust, some for the very first time.
The feedback during this part of the night was monumentally helpful in helping us figure out how we can improve NewsTrust. Some of the highlights included.
- Improving the visuals - The site is too text heavy right now.
- Creating different rate forms for different types of news stories - it's unfair to judge editorials by the same standard as news investigations.
- Making it easier to review a story.
- Taking NewsTrust.net mobile.
- Open ID
In truth, there was more feedback that can be itemized in this blog post: This is just to give you a sense of
what is on our radar.
Also in attendance that night was the web editor of Mother Jones, who will host a topic in the coming weeks and lead our first NewsTrust news hunt on a specific topic of his choosing. It is just one of the ways we hope to expand the reach of NewsTrust by partnering with other news organizations.
We hope to have more salons in the future - in cities all over the country. It is a way to take the goals of NewsTrust off-line and show other people what our community is really about. We want to perfect the ebb and flow of these events, but eventually we hope to turn them into something any member of the NewsTrust community could host at their home.
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