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.
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