Our new site launch

NewsTrust just launched a new version of its website, to make it easier for people to find and share quality journalism online.

This new site was designed with the help of our community, to provide a better user experience with enhanced review tools, more visual appeal and higher performance. NewsTrust.net now offers a number of innovative features, such as distinctive  'trust-o-meter' ratings, separate listings for news and opinion, new review forms for beginners and professionals, new rating criteria tracking both quality and popularity, faster story submissions, personal bookmarks and special comment sections. 

Here are some of the new features we released yesterday:

• new ratings - we now track quality ratings separately from popularity
• new 'trust-o-meters' - we've replaced star ratings with our own quality rating icons
• quick review form - we've made it simpler and faster, with different questions for news and opinion
• more review forms - we also offer full and advanced forms, with new questions for expert reviewers
• new rating questions - we now track important qualities, such as depth, enterprise, and originality
• new submission form - to save you time, we now auto-fill story information for the URL you provide
• new 'save' feature - you can now bookmark stories you find interesting (for later review in your profile)
• featured reviewers - we highlight our reviewers (and their photos) everywhere, with 'submitted by' credits
• full code rewrite - we've rewritten every line of code, for better performance and faster development

... and lots more

We've received very favorable responses about this new release from our members. Here are just a few examples of what they told us:

I really like the new site design! It's great having the reviewers more prominent on the page, the news and opinion sections delineated, the stories more clearly organized and the NewsHunt easy to find. I also like the changes to the review form. Congratulations! --Donica Mensing

I thought the featured reviews were a nice touch - they showed what makes NewsTrust different from all the other news sites one could visit. I also enjoyed the new ratings prettiness - the bars that move as you rate, etc. Shiny. I sincerely hope this whole project works out well - I do believe a site of this nature is needed. -- David Barber

Overall, the design is much more clear and easier to navigate. Though the design changes are subtle, the new site looks quite improved to me. I like the "trust-o-meter" -- very appropriate and distinctive. Good idea to add the submitter's name next to submitted story. Nice addition of member pictures to homepage. It makes NT seem more like a community. I really enjoy the site and believe what NT is doing is crucial for a healthy democracy! -- Kristin Gorski

Your new website is a big improvement over the appearance of the earlier version. It is easy to navigate and more attractive visually. -- Bill Jastromb

We'd like to give a big round of applause to our amazing web development team for their outstanding achievements: Adam Florin, David Fox, Subramanya Sastry and Mark Daggett whipped up a leading-edge site in just a few months, creating a much improved user interface and rewriting every line of code from scratch. They were supported by our dedicated staff members, who worked long hours, beyond the call of duty, towards this launch: Kaizar Campwala, Derek Hawkins and Beth Wellington -- as well as freelance contributors Taylor Buley, David 'DigiDave' Cohn, Ezra Fox and Bryan Purse. They've done wonders to improve the quality of our service -- and we're very lucky to have them on our team. (pictured below shows, from left to right, Adam, David, Fabrice, Kaizar and DigiDave)

We'd also like to give kudos to our key advisors, hosts and trusted reviewers, who went out of their way to provide invaluable advice to help design and test the site. Special credits go to: Ellyn Angelotti, Veronica Barlee, Wes Boyd, Michael Bugeja, Lee Callister, Vincent Caminiti, Walter Cox, Denise Clendening, Bill Densmore, Matisse Enzer, Terry Gamble, Kelly Garrett, Cynthia Gilbert, Dan Gillmor, Philippe Habib, Marsha Iverson, Dan Kennedy, Jim Lang, Patricia L'Herrou, Mike La Bonte, Lewyn Li, John McManus, Evelyn Messinger, Bill Mitchell, Craig Newmark, Dale Penn, Stephen Pizzo, Rory O'Connor, Howard Rheingold, Leo Romero, Dwight Rousu, Juliet Salette, Kim Spencer, Robert Vermeers, Elizabeth White-Nadler -- to name but a few. Thank you for your insights, your leadership and your commitment to our cause!

Our deepest thanks go to our funders, especially Kathy Im, John Bracken, Elspeth Revere and Jonathan Fanton at the MacArthur Foundation, without whom none of this would have been possible. We're grateful for their foresight in recognizing the need for new ways to help people find credible information online -- and are very honored that they supported this project as a worthy solution to this growing problem. We're also grateful to our other backers, including the Ayrshire Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Tides Foundation, as well as Google and private donors such as Craig Newmark, Mitch Kapor, Doug Carlston and Hap Perry. Thanks for believing in us!

Last but not least, we're grateful to the Ruby on Rails community for providing a worldclass development and technology platform as open source -- and to our partners at EngineYard for providing a superb infrastructure to host our service. We'd also like to thank Web Crossing, our previous technology provider, for helping us get started and for their generous support over the years. We couldn't have done it without them.

Thanks to all of your gracious contributions, we've created a compelling example of how citizens can join forces online to create new ways to filter information through web 2.0 networks  -- like our innovative social news service, which just got a whole lot better with yesterday's launch.

We hope this new site will make it easier for all of us to find and share quality journalism together -- and make more informed decisions as citizens.

Please share your comments and suggestions on our Feedback page. For technical issues, please file a bug report. And if you haven't already, add a picture to your member profile. It's a true pleasure to see all your faces and get to know you better.

Enjoy our new site!

Fabrice Florin
Executive Director, NewsTrust

Comments

[Patricia Blochowiak]

How do we end up with a reviewer named "Riskable" ???

[no Internet]

The launch of this site is a help in the modern technology and it’s sure that people would know additional information by this. People rely on the Internet. And when people have no Internet, they lose access to a lot of the information they depend on – whether it is their work, their financial information, or an application for an online payday loan. Since so much of daily life now revolves around a computer, it seems like all life has come to a stop if you can't surf the web. This is the reason why so many of us shell out for better Internet service, and wireless utilities. It's worth a payday loan to keep one's self from having no Internet.