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.
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