NewsTrust - Blog Archive

NTB recognizes students' contributions to finding good journalism

This blog post about our NewsTrust Baltimore local news experiment was written by community manager Gin Ferrara and originally published on our Baltimore blog on May 10, 2011. It is republished here for the benefit of our national community.

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We held our student awards event last night at Towson University, sponsored by the school's chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Students and faculty gathered to recognize the reviewers who provided our local news experiment with the most trusted, relevant and thoughtful reviews.

Three superlative awards were given to the top reviewers: 

• News Hound: The student with greatest number of trusted reviews.
• Top Student Researcher: The student with the most trusted reviews who also posted the most stories from a diversity of sources.
• Most Trusted Reviewer: The student whose reviews are the most trusted by the NewsTrust community.

We also recognized more than 60 students who have become Certified Student Reviewers. These students all reviewed six or more stories, including two we selected for them, and gave thoughtful, critical reviews. In the coming weeks, you may notice a new badge that recognizes these reviewers on the site.

NewsTrust's founder and executive director, Fabrice Florin, joined us for this event, and he thanked the Towson community for their participation and support of NewsTrust Baltimore. He also gave special thanks to the professors who supported the student reviewers: JoAnne Broadwater, Thom Leib and Stacy Spaulding. Their engagement with the site was instrumental in building student participation.

The gathering concluded with mingling, eating pizza and talking about summer plans. We were happy to hear that many students have internships lined up with news organizations, while others are taking classes or working at summer jobs. We hope these sharp Towson students will continue to be a part of the community now that their coursework is done!

In addition to the Towson awardees, one Loyola University student, RaShawna Sydnor, became a Certified Student Reviewer. We thank her for her thoughtful reviews and enthusiasm for the project and also thank her professor, Stephanie Flores-Koulish, for welcoming us into her classroom.

Here's the complete list of awards and winners:

Most Trusted Reviewer: Anthony E. Laus

News Hound: Devin Hamberger

Top Student Reviewer: Daniel Rodgers

Certified Student Reviewers:

Meghan Ashman, Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Sara Beegoo, Brittany C. Bell, Kate N. Bernard, Jennie Byrne, Lauren Calva, Mike Campbell, Susan Connelly, Michael Correlli, Cari Crabtree, Megen Donovan, Kara Duffy, Lily Duffy, Raymond Alonzo Durante, Delfina Ezcurra, Nattasha Farr, Amanda Khera Fenell, Megan Flannery, Evelyn Fogleman, Breyana Franklin, Amanda Friedberg, Ashley Gallaher, Erica Glass, Alex Glaze, Ariel Gononsky, Kelly Gray, Jacqueline Gucker, Devin Hamberger, Elizabeth Hardisty, Asia S. Hinton, Samantha Iacia, Victoria Karolenko, Dana Kobilinsky, Melissa Kronenberger, Isobel Kuchinsky, Sarah LaCorte, Anthony E. Laus, Laurel Lewkowitz, Sara Lindemann, Sabrina Lindsey, Edward MacNabb, Marie Moore, Ali Pannoni, Rossella Procopio, Hope Regalbuto, Daniel Rodgers, Brendan Russell, Adam Salk, Dana Satisky, Zachary Schwartz, Lauren Slavin, Olivia Stephens, Hannah Stup, RaShawna Sydnor, Kathryn VandenHeuvel, Josh Venecia, Ashley Ward, Alex Watts, Ashley T. Williams, Jeremy Winn, Kayla Yingst, Alyssa Zauderer. 

Reinventing the news at Northeastern

Earlier this month, Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy, a longtime NewsTrust reviewer and advisor, invited his journalism students to review stories on NewsTrust as part of his Reinventing the News class, as he had done in previous years.

Prof. Kennedy prepared his students for this exercise with the help of Mike LaBonte, another veteran reviewer, host and advocate of NewsTrust. Since last year's partnership, we've developed a range of new educational tools to help students tell apart fact from fiction in the news.

Here's Prof. Kennedy's report about this year's project, republished here from his blog.

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Social-networking the news with NewsTrust

Reinventing the News students. For more photos, click on image.

As has become a ritual in Reinventing the News, last Friday, April 1, Mike LaBonte, an editor with NewsTrust, visited our class and helped run a demonstration. NewsTrust is a social network aimed at identifying and rating news stories on criteria such as accuracy, thoroughness and fairness.

This time, we took advantage of advancements in the NewsTrust software to try something new. Jon Mitchell of NewsTrust set up a group page for us, so all student reviews can easily be found there. Earlier today, students finished their NewsTrust reviews for the week and posted their thoughts about the experience on their blogs. Here are the direct links to their NewsTrust posts:

Anna Marden Brianna Tulp Chelsea DeCesare Erin Kelly Gail Waterhouse Jake Sutera Laura Nelson

Lindsey O’Connor Lucas Schoeppner Michele Richinick Pat Tarantino Robert Bumsted Sarah Moffitt Taylor Dobbs

- by Dan Kennedy

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As always, we were very impressed with the quality of reviews from Reinventing the News students, and we loved their blog posts about their experience. Here are a few of our favorite reflections from students:

"I enjoyed my rating exercise, because I’m much more knowledgeable with the site and now I can hopefully use it as a resource for my blog posts. I enjoy how users can rate journalists and weed out poor journalism."
- Brianna Tulp

"News Trust depends on many levels to function and ensure quality; from the thousands of people who rate articles to the editors to the admins. The basic concept behind News Trust is great, people can choose articles and be able to trust them before they even begin to read based on others comments. This is also its flaw though. Everyone should read articles critically and not rely on someone elses rating of the article as whether or not it is valuable"
- Sarah Moffitt

"Though NewsTrust isn’t generating the traffic I feel it needs to effectively serve its intended purpose, I plan to keep reviewing and posting stories to the site. I really like the interface and the concept put forth here, and I hope to see the community grow and the traffic grow until NewsTrust can properly filter the day’s stories."
- Taylor Dobbs

Prof. Kennedy offered these remarks after the conclusion of the exercise:

In my experience, NewsTrust helps students think critically about journalism -- what's good, what's bad and how a story could be made fairer or more thorough. Because I teach journalism, my hope is that NewsTrust will lead students to become not just better educated consumers of news, but more thoughtful practitioners of their craft as well.

 

We're very grateful to Dan and his students for participating on NewsTrust and sharing their good insights with us. A big thanks as well to veteran NewsTrust host Mike LaBonte for presenting our work to this year's class.

To learn more out educational partnerships with NewsTrust, check out our 2010 Education Report.

- by Jon Mitchell

The first six weeks of NewsTrust Baltimore

This blog post about our NewsTrust Baltimore local news experiment was written by local editor Mary Hartney and originally published on our Baltimore blog on March 15, 2011. It is republished here for the benefit of our national community with some additional material.

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As we hit the midpoint of March, we're a month and a half into the NewsTrust Baltimore pilot, and this is a good opportunity to take a step back to see how this social news experiment is going.

Let's start with the stats. In the first six weeks of this project, we've had more than 6,000 visitors to the site, with more than 12,000 visits, and nearly 60,000 page-views. On average, NewsTrust Baltimore users spend nearly 6 minutes on the site per visit -- wow! That tells me that our members are very engaged, which we also see from their thoughtful comments and reviews. We have nearly 500 members at this point, and more than 300 of those are reviewers. We're delighted that these numbers exceed our goals!

We've set some additional goals for ourselves for the extension of this project, which will run through July, and we're well on our way to hitting those marks. Our media and educational partners continue to help us grow, by promoting this project, sending us visitors and asking their communities to review stories on NewsTrust Baltimore.

We're grateful that our members continue to support this social news experiment, as well. NewsTrust Baltimore reviewers are leaving thoughtful reviews across the site -- check out these blog posts for examples -- and helping post stories from a variety of news sources covering Baltimore and Maryland.

As we move forward, we want to stay connected to our community, and we always welcome your feedback. Are we missing any sources that you like to read online? Have we missed news stories that are important to you? Would you like us to work with your school or educational program? Let us know how we can help and improve. You can always leave a comment on the blog or send us an email at baltimore-at-newstrust-dot-net.

If you haven't already signed up for NewsTrust Baltimore, please do so. To stay up to date with the latest news and information about this project, we recommend you sign up to get our daily and weekly newsletters, which you can sign up for in your "my account" area, in the emails tab. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks for helping make this experiment a success!

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Here are reports on the first six news hunts we conducted in Baltimore:

• Politics News Hunt Results
• Business News Hunt Results
• Sci/Tech News Hunt Results
• Living News Hunt Results
• Community News Hunt Results
• Transportation News Hunt Results

To learn more about these programs, read our News Hunts overview page.

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Here is an excerpt from community manager Gin Ferrara's blog post on March 17, 2011 about the first NewsTrust Baltimore community meet-up:

On Tuesday evening, March 15, we stepped away from our computers and headed down to Teavolve in Harbor East for our first meetup with the NewsTrust Baltimore community: partners, journalists, members, and Baltimoreans invested in good journalism. We wanted to celebrate the extension to the pilot and to have the chance to just chat with each other about Baltimore, journalism, and our role as members of the broader community.

Check out our photo slideshow from the event:

Read more about the meet-up on the Baltimore blog.

A commitment to media literacy

This blog post about our NewsTrust Baltimore local news experiment was written by community manager Gin Ferrara and originally published on our Baltimore blog on March 24, 2011. It is republished here for the benefit of our national community.

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As we walked into the classroom, Kim Kardashian’s voice filled the room. She was flirting with her personal trainer, and the students were laughing appreciatively at the sneaker commercial’s double entendres.

While this might seem like strange material for a Master’s course, it’s perfect for Media Literacy Education, a course requirement for graduate students in Loyola University's literacy education program. NewsTrust Baltimore local editor Mary Hartney and I had the pleasure of attending Dr. Stephanie Flores-Koulish’s class a few weeks ago, where the students were analyzing the subtexts in Super Bowl commercials.

By analyzing and exploring contemporary media of all sources, Flores-Koulish says that she intends to "prepare teachers to consider literacy beyond traditional texts, towards visual and multimedia literacies."

"I tend to use hands-on approaches whenever possible," she said. This includes the analyses of television commercials, students producing their own public service announcements, and a class trip to the Newseum for an immersive news experience.

Fortunately for us, it also means using NewsTrust Baltimore to explore local journalism.

As part of the course requirements, students respond to questions and reflect on assignments on an online discussion board, and Flores-Koulish integrated NewsTrust Baltimore into the plan. Her students reviewed one of three selected articles on our site and re-posted their comments on the discussion board.

RaShawna Sydnor, a graduate student in education, said of the experience, "Concept-wise, NewsTrust was an important element because it made you 'part' of the news, not just a spectator."

Melanie Maisey, a kindergarten teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School, said: "I appreciated the depth of the questions asked when we reviewed an article. The thoroughness of not only what was asked, but how it was asked, prompted deeper thinking." 

For Flores-Koulish, the ultimate goal of teaching is to spread media literacy. "I firmly believe in the power of grassroots movements, and teaching teachers this new field falls in line with that belief," she said. 

From her own research, she has seen that her "students' eyes are opened by this material, and many are compelled to include it in their teaching." 

Her students seem to agree. Sydnor said that "having students gain the ability to recognize the differences between news and opinion and gauge tone, frame, and intended audience, is an insight that very many adults don't have, and I believe that the earlier they are introduced the better."

Maisey recognizes the importance of understanding the motivations behind media. "It is not only important to be able to empathize with the subject, situations, and people, it is also important to stand in the shoes of the journalist." 

She thinks that this helps people ask critical questions and "dig deeper to find a truth that is less biased and more personal."

Sydnor has a dream of opening a charter school for girls and sees media literacy as a core element of their education. "Critical literacy will help shape how they see themselves in the world and, with any hope, trigger the ambition to change and educate others,” she said.

As media’s role continues to increase in our lives, the need to understand it will grow, as well. Fortunately, Flores-Koulish and her students are ready to teach. 

Posting stories: Use the Force

This blog post about our NewsTrust Baltimore local news experiment was written by community manager Gin Ferrara and originally published on our Baltimore blog on March 1, 2011. It is republished here for the benefit of our national community.

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While community matters to us every week, for the next two weeks NewsTrust Baltimore is making a special effort to focus on capital "C" Community as our main news topic. And we need your help!

You've likely read and reviewed a few stories on our site, but the next step is to post stories yourself. We do what we can to post stories from a wide range of sources. But there may be a story that slips through the cracks, or a new blog that is especially insightful. We need your help to find those hidden gems and to share them with your fellow members. In doing so, you are building your skills as a critical news consumer -- think of it as honing your Jedi powers.

Posting is a pretty simple process, with a few special tricks.

1. Click on the yellow "Post A Story" button on the top right of any NewsTrust Baltimore page. 
2. Past the URL of the story you wish to add to the site. 
3. A new page will open that shows the story and either a frame or a second window for editing the information about the story.
4. Select "Full Edit Form" from the drop-down menu on the top right.

Now you're ready to fill out the story's info. Follow these tips for mastery!

1. Fill out the title of the story -- it may have auto-filled, but the automation is not always correct. It should match what is on the story's original page. You also should remove any extraneous source information -- we just want the headline, not the name of the news organization or blog.
2. Add a subtitle, if there is one, by clicking on the blue "Is there a subtitle?" link just below the title.
3. Fill in the author, using a comma between writers if there is more than one. If there is no author listed, leave this line blank.
4. Select the type of story, either news or opinion -- bonus points for being even more specific, like marking it "news analysis" or "editorial." (If you are not sure, sometimes the news source will note the type above the headline.)
5. For the content field, choose the media of the story. The most commonly used are article, blog post, video, and audio-streaming.
6. The source of the story is the name of the news source, not the URL. (Sometimes the Associated Press is the actual source, though it is listed on a local news site. In that case, enter "Associated Press.")
7. Add the following topic tags to the story, pressing "enter" after each one: Baltimore, Local and Community, if appropriate. (Adding "Baltimore" and "Local" will ensure the story shows up on NewsTrust Baltimore, so these are the two most important!)
8. Add any other topic tags that are relevant (e.g., Transportation, Maryland Legislature, Judaism). Many tags will auto-fill once you have typed part of a word -- those are our main topic areas. 
9. Select "local" as the story scope to ensure the story shows up on the NewsTrust Baltimore site.
10. Make sure you select the date of the story to be the date of publication, not today's date. Otherwise a 2-year-old story about a heat wave could become one of today's top stories!

To read more about posting stories, check out our FAQ.

This is a great week to try posting a story. Share an article about your neighborhood, an opinion about your culture or a report on your interests. Review the article you've posted, and see what other folks recommend. You have become one with the news!

Teaching ourselves some new tricks

This blog post about our NewsTrust Baltimore local news experiment was written by community manager Gin Ferrara and originally published on our Baltimore blog on February 11, 2011. It is republished here for the benefit of our national community.

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As a media educator since the mid-90s, I often find that students come to the class with a very solid worldview and assess the quality of news less on its journalistic merit than on how closely it aligns with their own beliefs.

I've noticed the same is true for me as I get older -- and it's easy to read the news seeking reinforcement for what I already think. 

That is why the review process here at NewsTrust Baltimore is so great: it shakes up our expectations, and helps us look at journalism with a less jaded eye. By taking the time to break down a news story into its parts: the facts, the balance, the sources, the relevance, we give ourselves a chance to think more clearly about the news, and learn how to separate fact from opinion. In the end, we hope, we will become better informed and more thoughtful news consumers (and, for some of us, news producers).

This image does a great job of illustrating how easy it can be to jump to conclusions!

Image from the book "unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation," by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Here are some ways to help you think differently as you evaluate stories:

Review stories using the "full rating" form. This is a selection in the drop-down menu at the top-right of the review form. Roll up your sleeves and dig in! With 10 thoughtful questions about the quality of the journalism, you will be analyzing the news like a pro in no time.

Leave a note. Sometimes justifying your observations is difficult. By leaving a note explaining why the story is good (or not so good) journalism, you help make your case. It's possible you may also discover that your review needs to be updated to reflect your notes (this happens to me often!). I see the notes as a way to keep ourselves honest: if you are willing to say it, then you can stand behind your rating. (If you have a personal opinion of the subject matter of the article, use the 'Comments' tab for your thoughts.)

Check out reviews by Tina Carroll, Michael Corbin, and Laura Perkins to see some great examples of thoughtful, critical reviews.

Read and comment on other reviews. We're working as a team to find the best local journalism. Even though we're all at separate desks, by commenting on (and rating) each other's reviews, we are collaborating on this experiment, and building a broader discourse on the journalism and news of our community.

Thank you all for welcoming NewsTrust Baltimore and getting involved. Please sign up if you have not done so, keep reviewing if you have, and tell your friends to join us!

NewsTrust Baltimore just launched!

Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of NewsTrust Baltimore, our first local news site. 

We invite you to join this online experiment, along with other Baltimore residents, to find and share good journalism about their community.

Why NewsTrust Baltimore?
The Internet has radically changed the way we get our news, introducing new problems for cities like Baltimore: Traditional media have reduced their local news coverage, new media startups are struggling to fill in the gaps, and social networks are flooding us with too much unreliable information.

To address these problems, NewsTrust Baltimore aims to feature on a single site the best news coverage in the region, selected from a wide range of local online, print and broadcast outlets. Our online news hub, which is funded by the Open Society Foundations, welcomes all Baltimore citizens to rate and discuss local news stories, in collaboration with NewsTrust editors -- and share the best reporting with each other.

Meet our team
I am delighted to introduce our local team, which will be leading this experiment for the next few months:

Mary Hartney - Local Editor
Mary has been a journalist for nearly a decade, beginning as a newspaper copy editor and most recently serving as director of audience engagement at The Baltimore Sun. She is responsible for updating our site and managing relationships with our media partners. Check out her profile.

Gin Ferrara - Community Manager
Gin has been a media educator since the early 1990’s and is the founder of Wide Angle Youth Media. She is responsible for supporting our online community and managing relationships with our educational partners. Check out her profile.

Our national NewsTrust team has worked hard to develop this site and community relations in the past few months, and will also participate actively in this pilot. They include: managing editor Jon Mitchell; lead engineer Subramanya Sastry; technology director David Fox; and yours truly, executive director Fabrice Florin.  

Meet our partners
For this project, we have partnered with a number of local news organizations, including the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore magazine, The Mark Steiner Show (WEAA-FM), Urbanite Magazine and WYPR-FM, as well as online sites, including Baltimore Brew, Center Maryland, Citybizlist and Baltimore-area Patch sites. These media partners will invite their audiences to participate in this interactive quest, and many will host special activities with us, as well as include NewsTrust feeds and widgets on their sites.

We are also partnering with several local colleges and high schools, including Towson University, the University of Maryland, Morgan State University, the Baltimore Freedom Academy and The Baltimore Civitas School. These educational partners will train their students to rate and curate the news on their own group pages, earning certificates for their work.

Our most important partner of all is the Open Society Foundations, especially its audacious team in Baltimore. We are particularly grateful to Lori McGlinchey, Diana Morris and Debra Rubino for their vision, insights and inspiring support of this project. Besides providing funding for NewsTrust Baltimore, they have participated actively as collaborators, introducing us to their community, and making us feel welcome in Charm City.

Meet our community
This experiment is first and foremost about Baltimore and its community. Already, hundreds of folks have contributed to this project, including local citizens, community leaders, advisors and partners, all of who took the time to share their thoughts with us and participate on our site. You can view some of their portraits on a special slide show we created for this project, Faces of Baltimore, as well as on our members page.

We think this initiative offers a unique opportunity for Baltimore citizens to become better informed and more engaged about local issues -- especially college and high school students. Our service will show them how to tell apart good journalism from misinformation, so they can become more discerning news consumers.

Join the experiment
We hope you will sign up and participate in this fascinating investigation of Baltimore's  news ecosystem (if you already are a NewsTrust member, there is no need to sign up again, but you might like to subscribe to our Baltimore email newsletters). We think this community-based social network can improve the way we get our local news and help us all make more informed decisions as citizens.

Give it a try -- and review a story today. This week, we are reviewing stories on politics -- and Mary will tell you all about this in our local blog, where future updates on this project will be posted (this national blog will only include highlights). We will release our first findings in April and give awards to news outlets that are providing high-quality reporting, as determined by our reviewers and editors.

Hope to see you soon on NewsTrust Baltimore!

Fabrice Florin
Founder and Executive Director
NewsTrust Communications

NewsTrust 2010 Education Report

In 2010, the NewsTrust team developed a range of new educational tools to help students tell apart fact from fiction in the news. Here are some highlights of this year's educational programs, in partnership with ten different universities and high schools.

 

Border News - A student-powered news site
This fall, we hosted our most ambitious educational pilot yet: Border News was our first nationwide, interscholastic collaboration at the college level. Convened by professors Sally Lehrman and Venise Wagner, this project brought together 235 students from five colleges to find good (and bad) journalism about immigration. 

The participating colleges and their faculty hosts were:

• Santa Clara University [hosted by Sally Lehrman]
• San Francisco State University [hosted by Venise Wagner and Katynka Martinez]
• University of Alabama [hosted by George Daniels]
• University of Nevada, Reno [hosted by Donica Mensing]
• Columbia College [hosted by Teresa Puente]

We invited all students to find good journalism on immigration, using our new group curation tools. Their student-powered news site, Border News, featured their most trusted stories throughout this experiment. For thirteen weeks, they collaborated with each other and with the NewsTrust community in a special Immigration News Hunt, from September 13th to December 1st, 2010. Together, we searched for the best news coverage of immigration and generated 1,386 reviews of 340 stories on this topic, of which 1,086 reviews (78%) came from the students, with coaching from their professors. (see photos from our SFSU kick-off meeting with Venise Wagner's class)

On Border News, the students curated an informative feed of immigration stories on NewsTrust. We also experimented with other social tools for curating and sharing the news. The professors asked their students to publicize their activity on Twitter under the hashtag "#bordernews." This enabled an open conversation about immigration issues on social media, with NewsTrust stories as the background. It also enabled these journalism students to practice their Twitter skills. Catchy headlines, smart keyword use, and short-linking are essential skills for journalists today, and Border News students were able to practice them, thanks to deep Twitter integration on NewsTrust.

Border News was the first public pilot to use our new NewsTrust Groups application. On the Border News group page, you can see a current listing of all the stories posted, reviewed, and starred by the students and faculty members, as well as their comments. The stories on this page display a special blue Trust-O-Meter showing the Group Rating, meaning the average NewsTrust rating given by members of the group, rather than the community at large. Underneath the Group Rating, the site-wide rating is shown in green numerals for comparison. This allows you to see how the ratings from Border News students compare to those of the NewsTrust community in general. (See also our full listing of the students' most trusted stories)

The journalism professors who partnered with us on this project thought Border News was a success. SCU professor Sally Lehrman, who came up with the idea for this experiment, shared these reflections:

"I was delighted when San Francisco State and the other universities agreed to jump on board with SCU. Now NewsTrust gives students the opportunity to interact thoughtfully with immigration news in real time and with others in their age group around the country... I've noticed greater awareness of the perspectives embedded in the news and the code words that help shape these."

Journalism professor Donica Mensing at UNR, a long-time NewsTrust friend and partner, felt that Border News "was a great success. The students were far more engaged by focusing primarily on one topic than in previous years when I left the topic open."

Most encouraging of all were the responses from the students themselves. Here are just a few of them:

"I really like how [NewsTrust] is very organized, especially when it comes to search for a news story. By being a member, I get the opportunity to read the most recent top stories and add my own opinion (it help me a lot when it came to find articles on immigration) and rate it. It would be awesome to see a similar version of NewsTrust in spanish, but overall great site. Keep up the wonderful work!"
- Marianna Ballesteros, SFSU

"I like the user-interface and the scoring system of rank and merit on the site. I like the idea that if I contribute enough to the site, I will watch my rating increase. I like that the stories themselves are being reviewed (if only at times) by fellow journalists, which make for a system in self-regulation. Essentially, I like that journalists are patrolling their own, ensuring that the ideals of objectivity and peer-review are upheld."
- Christian Bertolaccini, UNR

"The ability to view ratings, reviews, and other people's opinions on a story... helped me to decide if the story was trustworthy. I think this collaborative gathering of news, to put together a source of "good journalism" is a great idea and very useful tool."
- Isabella Sleister, UNR

"I joined NewsTrust for a journalism class that I am in. I look forward to contributing; I wouldn't have heard of this site if it weren't for this class and I think that it's a great idea and I'm glad to be a part of it."
- Che Bajandas, SFSU

 

Reinventing the News at Northeastern
NewsTrust can help teach news literacy, civics and journalism in a variety of ways, and more schools are now starting to use our tools on their own, without requiring our help. This semester, while we were facilitating the Border News project, long-time NewsTrust advisor Dan Kennedy's "Reinventing The News" course at Northeastern University and the JRN 215 class at Eastern Michigan University both used NewsTrust in their classrooms.

Check out Dan Kennedy's round-up blog post, in which he links to some great comments and criticisms of NewsTrust from his students. Earlier this year, Dan invited another class of students to review stories on NewsTrust and write about their experience. See our earlier blog post. Northeastern student Hannah Martin offered this eloquent description of what she learned using NewsTrust:

"What I liked about the reviewing experience was it forced me to really analyze my news on its journalistic value, which, as bad as it sounds, is often something that slips my mind." ... "I browse the headlines of nyt.com, read what looks important, and accept it as fact, rarely stopping to count sources or assess context. The process of reviewing though, forced me to think through all the elements of each piece, and consider what, as a journalist, should ultimately be there."
- Hannah Martin, Northeastern

 

Studying Journalism at EMU
At the same time, other journalism projects like the News Writing and Reporting class at Eastern Michigan University have started using NewsTrust on their own, to help students develop their news literacy skills. For a student perspective, be sure to read Kaylee Lentz's wonderful blog post entitled "What I've learned from NewsTrust." Here's a highlight:

"I feel so much more aware of my fellow inhabitants just from browsing [NewsTrust]’s news section. So, after having such an eye-opening experience, I’ll probably keep this website close to me and reference it often."
- Kaylee Lentz, EMU

 

Our First High School Pilots
In April 2010, we hosted our first high school pilots with the International High School in San Francisco and the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, with funding from the Ayrshire Foundation and Omidyar Network. This spring, 120 high school students participated in our Global Economy News Hunt with Global Voices and Link TV (see photos from IHS). This pilot demonstrated that NewsTrust can be effectively extended for secondary education. According to their teachers, students became more engaged as citizens and more savvy about the news; they also learned a great deal about the global economy and surrounding civic issues. Read more about this high school pilot in our full report (PDF).

Here are some comments from high school teachers who used NewsTrust in their classrooms:

"Students were quite inspired. Many had the opportunity to really think about the conventions and current state of journalism for the first time. The instrument itself as a piece of IT was impressive and represents a positive aspect of how journalism is evolving in this digital age."
- Andrew Brown, International High School of San Francisco

"The relevance of the content, interactive interface and socially networked learning all impressed me about the NewsTrust framework for classroom use. Most of the 'liked least' issues were addressed throughout the spring with adjustments and enhancements to the service."
- Diana Laufenberg, Science Leadership Academy of Philadelphia

 

Bad Journalism News Hunt
In March 2010, we ran a one-week Bad Journalism News Hunt with journalism students from Stanford University, under the guidance of professor and NewsTrust board member Howard Rheingold. This project produced some excellent work, as well as some valid and thoughtful criticisms of NewsTrust and the process of crowd-sourced news curation. Stanford student Susana Montes-Delgado shared these observations:

"NewsTrust, apart from helping readers discern between good and crappy information, is a great tool to test your journalism literacy. By using a review form, you evaluate stories based on how factual, balanced and contextual they are. But most importantly, the system allows you to be more critical about the information you consume on the Web."
- Susana Montes-Delgado, Stanford

See our report to learn more; there were many valuable insights from this News Hunt.

This was our second hunt for bad journalism with college students; our first, with Santa Clara University in Fall 2009 (see blog post), paved the way for this year's Border News collaboration.

 

Feedback from Educators
This summer, we surveyed our partners and advisors to get their feedback about these educational applications of NewsTrust.

Here are our key observations from this survey:

• most teachers we surveyed found NewsTrust useful for their school (90%)
• over three-quarters were planning to use NewsTrust again next year (77%)
• teachers told us their students became more engaged in the news as a result

Teachers pointed to these key benefits when asked what their students could learn best from NewsTrust:

• to think critically about what they read (90%)
• to recognize good journalism (63%)
• to recognize bad journalism (58%)

Going forward, they were planning to use NewsTrust for these applications:

• for a single class activity (as outlined in our teacher guides) (65%)
• as an ongoing research tool (for learning about any topic you like) (53%)
• for a weeklong News Hunt (or news comparison) (47%)

They also thought that NewsTrust would be most useful for media studies, civics / government, social studies and journalism classes.

Because this particular survey was limited to educators who were already familiar with our service, their feedback was well informed, and their insights were invaluable for planning our next steps in education.

 

 

Personal Observations
Prior to joining NewsTrust, I coordinated civic engagement programs in a mid-sized public school district, and NewsTrust's potential as a civics and media literacy teaching tool was one of the key features that drew me in to this job. To complement our report above, I would like to share my personal observations about NewsTrust's potential as an educational tool.

Our spring 2010 educational pilots were some of my first NewsTrust projects as a contributing editor for NewsTrust. After taking the reins as managing editor this fall, I had the privilege of conducting the Border News project and experimenting with NewsTrust's versatile set of tools for teaching news literacy and media studies.

Based on my experience this year, it appears that we've built some useful tools for students and educators alike. NewsTrust review tools and story listings already enabled deeper engagement with the news, and now, with the new Groups application, I think NewsTrust is coming of age as a resource for students.

NewsTrust Groups provide an ideal platform for any number of ways classrooms could engage with the news. A group can be a student-curated news site, allowing students to run their own virtual newsroom. It can also be an online news discussion section moderated by an instructor. We can create groups for entire schools, or for individual sections or classes, or even for small-group work within a class. It provides teachers the ability to evaluate their students' work, and it allows students to respond to each other. For schools concerned about confidentiality, we even have a variety of privacy options, so that NewsTrust Groups can be visible to the web, to NewsTrust members only, or restricted to members of the group.

For an ideal example of what students and teachers can do with NewsTrust, look no further than Border News.

We'd like to thank the students who worked with us this year for doing an amazing job, and their instructors for bringing these unprecedented and innovative projects into their classrooms. We learned a lot in the process and hope to develop a full set of educational tools over time, to help the next generation of citizens become more savvy about they hear in the news.

If you're an educator interested in using NewsTrust with your students, be sure to read our teacher guides, student guides, activities and other educational resources on our site. If you have any questions, please send us a message at schools-at-newstrust-dot-net. We would love to work with you to help you use NewsTrust in your classroom.

We look forward to hosting more educational activities as part of our upcoming NewsTrust Baltimore pilot -- and we hope all these experiments will lead to some exciting new projects in the future.

-- by Jon Mitchell, Managing Editor

Support our work
If you think our educational work is useful, please consider a donation, so we can keep providing services like these to the public in 2011. NewsTrust is not a commercial site, it is free community service dedicated to helping people find quality news and information online. Read more about our nonprofit organization, which is devoted to promoting good journalism, news literacy and civic engagement.

Thank you!

Farewell from Kaizar

[Ed: NewsTrust's long-time associate editor, Kaizar Campwala, is leaving us this month to pursue graduate studies at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. We asked him to share his insights on his experience in this blog post.]

Nearly four years ago, I was sitting at NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin's dining table in Marin, CA, discussing with him and David Fox what my responsibilities would be as the new associate editor at NewsTrust. The site was up and running in a prototype form, and we were preparing to launch it as a public beta a month later, in November of 2006.

Today, as I leave NewsTrust to start graduate school in a few weeks, I find that the mission that initially drew me to the project -- helping citizens take responsibility for the news and information they consume -- is still as salient and critical as ever. Information overload, political polarization, and widespread misinformation -- the problems that spurred the creation of NewsTrust -- persist despite major advances in technology and shifts in the American political landscape. Smartphones and social media have only increased the amount of information coming at us, and the vicious, ill-informed debate that's currently raging about the "Ground Zero Mosque" shows that the divisive "culture wars" are still very much alive.

In the face of these challenges, NewsTrust has done a remarkable job of staying responsive to changing patterns of news consumption and an ever-quickening news cycle, while remaining committed to the qualities of good journalism by emphasizing contextual, fact-based reporting, and ideological open-mindedness. Maintaining this balance has sometimes meant sacrificing temporary gains in traffic or promotion, but it's kept the site anchored in the otherwise quickly shifting new media world.

It's not easy to distill the experiences of four years of editorial partnerships, new product development, and community management into a single blog post. I've had the opportunity to collaborate with some brilliant journalists, educators and technologists, and work on addressing some of the thorniest questions facing journalism today. Here are some of the highlights:

News Hunts
Many of our partnerships were built around the News Hunt model, where we focused on a single issue in the news, and compared how different news sources were covering it. All the News Hunts I worked on were eye-opening, but a few in particular stood out:

• June 2008: John McCain with Huffington Post - NewsTrust reviewers joined Huffington Post's citizen journalism team to paint a portrait of Senator McCain by aggregating news coverage about him and his Presidential campaign. The NewsTrust team, along with Amanda Michel (now at ProPublica), applied crowd-sourcing techniques to corral hundreds of volunteers to take part in this project. Many of these volunteers have gone on to become trusted members of the NewsTrust community.

• January 2009: War in Gaza with LinkTV - In comparing American and international news coverage of the Israeli attacks in Gaza, the NewsTrust community not only revealed how international media frame the Mideast conflict differently than many American outlets, but also exposed the breadth of voices and perspectives offered in American online media.

• July 2010: Immigration with USA Today - This last partnership highlighted how far "legacy" news organizations have come in embracing the ethos of the Internet. The USA Today team we worked with were happy to highlight and link to a variety of news articles, including content from their competitors, to educate readers about Arizona's controversial illegal-immigration law.

News Literacy
NewsTrust is a non-partisan organization, but that doesn't mean it has no agenda. The team is very interested in increasing the level of news literacy of online news readers. It's no surprise, then, that we love collaborating with educators. I would like to thank two in particular, who have been pioneers in using NewsTrust in the classroom: Sally Lehrman at Santa Clara University, who began using NewsTrust in her journalism classes in early 2009, and Diana Laufenberg, who leveraged NewsTrust as a part of her high school globalization class. Over the course of their semesters, I saw students in both classes develop the kind of confidence and savvy as news readers that makes for engaged, responsible citizens. It's been incredibly rewarding to watch students take to the site, and I look forward to seeing NewsTrust continue to grow in this vital space.

Community
Over my time at NewsTrust, I've reviewed over 12,500 individual news stories. That's a lot of news, and I'm certainly more knowledgeable for having read them (even the bad ones). But in many ways, my worldview expanded more from my interactions with other NewsTrust reviewers than all the thousands of articles I've read and reviewed. In their offline lives, NewsTrust members are bankers and activists, engineers and artists, and everything in between. What they share on the site is sense of curiosity about the world, and the courage to not simply accept the news that is fed to them, but rather to engage with it in a critical way. I don't use the word 'courage' lightly. It's easy to spout off political opinions on the countless comment threads across the web. Much harder is what NewsTrust reviewers demand of each other -- to deconstruct the news, asking intellectually taxing questions about a reporter's intentions, methods, and skill in producing the story being reviewed. I cannot begin to list the individual members who have touched me with their thoughtfulness, challenged me with their intellectual rigor, or opened my mind with their wisdom and life experience.

Challenges and Opportunities
Moving forward, NewsTrust will need the steadfast support of its community as it engages new audiences and continues to innovate around its mission. The increased blurring of news and opinion, and a growing emphasis on transparency over objectivity, may challenge the current review process, and defy the news vs. opinion format our members appreciate. Micro-news formats, citizen journalism, and the growth of video news online also present some interesting questions and opportunities for the site. How, for example, does NewsTrust bring the values of accuracy and fairness to the two-way conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, where a lot of important information (and misinformation) is being communicated today?

The success of the recent Truthsquad initiative shows that NewsTrust is moving in the right direction in addressing these challenges. I think there are so many fascinating and important areas in which NewsTrust can apply itself. I can't wait to see where the project goes next.

Acknowledgments
A lot of work goes into a project like NewsTrust. From simply keeping the site running, to creating new applications and forging new partnerships, it takes the dedication and vision of a fantastic staff and management. I'd like to acknowledge my former editorial colleagues Rory O'Connor, David Cohn, Beth Wellington, Joey Baker, Kristin Gorski, Jon Mitchell and Derek Hawkins for making me a more thoughtful media critic, and sharing some of their social media savvy with me.

I've also had the pleasure of working with Caleb Waldorf, Adam Florin, Subbu Sastry, and David Fox, the guys who built and maintain the sophisticated software that makes NewsTrust run. They somehow found the patience to deal with this non-engineer and his incessant questions.

Finally, a huge thank you to Fabrice. There are a lot of people with good ideas, but Fabrice is the rare person who can actually execute and make his good ideas a reality. He's been a generous mentor and fearless leader. I feel truly honored to have been part of his exceptional project.

See you online!

- By Kaizar Campwala

[Ed: We're deeply grateful for all that Kaizar has done for NewsTrust over the years, and will miss him as a colleague and a friend. Besides leading our editorial team, managing our community and partner relations, he has made some invaluable contributions to our strategy and overall direction. Kaizar is a great team player and thoughtful strategist, and we have all enjoyed his insights and creativity over the years. We wish him well in his new studies, and hope to work with him again soon as a freelance contributing editor.

We're also pleased to welcome Jon Mitchell as our new managing editor. Jon will assume all of Kaizar's responsibilities and expand many of the initiatives he started, such as our growing educational services. Many of you know Jon already, as he has taken on a leading role in recent months, culminating with his great management of our last Truthsquad pilot. Prior to joining NewsTrust, Jon was Civic Engagement Coordinator for the Public School District of Providence, RI. He graduated from Brown University in 2009, completing an independent concentration in Music & Mind. You'll be hearing more from him in coming weeks. Welcome aboard, Jon!]

Truthsquad Results: How to Fact-Check the News

How can citizens learn to fact-check the news online? To find out, NewsTrust created a new service called Truthsquad and invited our community to fact-check controversial quotes from politicians and pundits, with professional guidance. (see earlier blog post)

Our first pilot ran for a week, from August 2nd to 8th, 2010, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute and our advisors at FactCheck.org -- and with the generous support of Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation.

Our Truthsquad editors included: Kelly McBride, director of Poynter's Sense-Making Project; Steve Myers, managing editor for Poynter Online; Fabrice Florin, NewsTrust's executive director; and Jon Mitchell, our new managing editor. Throughout the pilot, Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org provided helpful tips and advice.

Here are our findings from this experiment in community fact-checking.

Overview
We created Truthsquad to help expose misinformation on the Internet -- and to give people new tools to fact-check the news, with professional oversight. Our hybrid 'pro-am' approach leverages the expertise of a few experienced journalists to show citizens how to tell fact from fiction in the news.

Each day during our pilot, our editors featured new quotes to research, and asked our community whether they were true or false. These short quotes were excerpted from recent news reports, opinions or political ads suggested by our editors and advisors.

Each quote page included links to factual evidence supporting or opposing that quote. We invited our community to review these links before giving a final answer. Editors actively searched for (and linked to) new evidence for their assigned quotes, monitored the community's answers and wrote a verdict based on the factual evidence we dug up together. We also held lively discussions of the quotes in our comments sections.

In all, we fact-checked twelve quotes as a community, with 528 answers from 307 participants. Each participant gave answers of "True," "False," or "Not Sure," with an average of 44 total answers per quote. Together, we posted 132 links to related evidence, which received 241 NewsTrust reviews. Participants were welcome to change their answers at any time, if they came across new factual evidence. As a result, participants changed their answers 57 times (which we view as a positive sign).

Truthsquad has generated more interest than any of the other pilots we hosted in 2010, and web traffic was also higher than usual. Over the week, we logged 12,801 pageviews for Truthsquad, and we estimate that at least 3,723 unique visitors checked it out, whether they participated or not.

In general, our community's responses were consistent with verdicts from our four Truthsquad editors. We were also pleased that comments from participants were civil, and that they seemed genuinely engaged in this communal quest for credible information.

Check it out for yourself. If you haven't already, try to fact-check some of the quotes on the Truthsquad overview page. Our final verdicts are posted on our earlier blog post (as well as on each quote page).

Based on this favorable response, we would like to offer Truthsquad on an ongoing basis, and we are now seeking donations and foundation support to provide it as a regular feature of our news curation service.

Report Contents:
• Quotes
• Featured Quotes
• Stats
• Survey Responses
• Thanks
• Next Steps


Related Stories about Truthsquad:
• GigaOm's Article on NYTimes.com
• Kelly McBride's Report on Poynter

Quotes
Here are the twelve quotes we fact-checked for this Truthsquad:

• "87 million Americans will be forced out of their coverage" by Obama's health care plan
  By Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator - 119 answers (featured below)
• Decline in illegal immigration to U.S. "due to the recession," not enforcement
  By Dick Morris, Fox News consultant - 105 answers (featured below)
• "Crime is totally out of control" in Phoenix
  By Bill O'Reilly, Fox News - 86 answers (featured below)
• "Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same" under the Affordable Care Act
  By Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services - 67 answers (featured below)
• "The 'Bush tax cuts' ... remain the single largest cause of America's structural deficit."
  By Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post - 65 answers (featured below)
• Environmental impact of the oil spill "much less than everyone feared."
  By Jacqueline Michel, Geochemist - 33 answers (featured below)
• "CIA and Google investing in "a company that monitors the web... to predict the future."
  By Noah Shachtman, Wired - 19 answers
• "Warren Buffett called Greene's scheme 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
  By Kendrick Meek (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate - 17 answers
• "There's no evidence of any significant concentration of oil that we haven't accounted for."
  By Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - 15 answers
• "Meek lobbied for big tobacco against children's healthcare."
  By Jeff Greene (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate - 14 answers
• "Norton pushed the largest tax hike in Colorado history."
  By Americans For Job Security - 12 answers
• Obama's choice for budget chief "received more than $900,000 from Citigroup"
  By Jim McElhatton, The Washington Times - 9 answers

The first six quotes above are featured below, with more findings. To see our verdicts for all twelve quotes, check our earlier blog post.

Featured Quotes
Here are more detailed findings on the six quotes which we featured during this pilot.

"87 million Americans will be forced out of their coverage"
by Obama's health care plan
By Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator
Our verdict: FALSE
119 answers

Our investigation of this quote from Sen. Orrin Hatch led to some of the best collaborative fact-checking in this pilot. With 123 answers, this quote was the most active of the week, and 105 of these answers agreed with our verdict that Senator Hatch's statement was "False" (eight said "True," and ten were "Not Sure"). This strong consensus may be due to the great teamwork of Truthsquad editor Steve Myers and NewsTrust member Gerald Zuckier, who jointly dug up the actual text of the health care regulations and helped produce an impressive verdict.

From Steve Myers' verdict: (on behalf of Truthsquad editors)
"This quote wasn't easy to fact-check, for several reasons: Hatch doesn't provide a source for his figures or much of a clue as to what he's talking about. A Republican member of Congress issued similar talking points that provided an incorrect link to the federal regulations he's referring to. And while Hatch says this with certainty, the regulations only predict what could happen in the future. (...)

Score one for crowdsourcing, though: NewsTrust contributor Gerald Zuckier found the right set of regulations, read them and concluded that Hatch misstates what the regulations say. After reading the regulations, we agree."
See full verdict »

Decline in illegal immigration to U.S. "due to the recession,"
not enforcement
By Dick Morris, Fox News consultant
Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE
105 answers

For the two weeks before this pilot, we hosted an Immigration News Hunt with USA Today, so we were well prepared to research this quote about illegal immigrants. Morris' statement proved controversial; out of the 107 respondents, 54 found it false, while 36 answered true.

Contributing edior Derek Hawkins, after consulting the linked sources, concluded that "enforcement appears to have played at least as great a role" as economics, answering "False." Randolph Selig found the statement "True," contending that "the big draw is jobs." Still others, such as TC Reg, were "Not Sure." Reg thought that "it's impossible to say for sure as no scientifically valid studies have been conducted on the subject."

Eventually, the Truthsquad editors ruled that the statement was "Mostly False." The verdict was based on two major studies of immigration patterns on the U.S./Mexico border from credible sources. The linked sources that opposed the quote received an average NewsTrust rating of 3.4, slightly higher than the 3.1 average for sources that supported Morris.

From Jon Mitchell's verdict: (on behalf of Truthsquad editors)
"Downward economic trends... must have had an effect, but both studies point out that rates of legal immigration remained constant as illegal immigration dropped. Though illegal immigration comprises most of the traffic, and economics are clearly a factor, the constant rate of legal immigration suggests that some other factor makes it harder for people to enter the country illegally."
See full verdict »

"In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control."
By Bill O'Reilly, Fox News
Our verdict: FALSE
86 answers

Our members posted evidence from a wide range of sources that disproved this quote. While some other participants posted links to support O'Reilly's assertion, the group found those far less trustworthy. The sources that opposed O'Reilly's statement received an average NewsTrust rating of 3.7, a strong indication of credibility, whereas the sources that supported O'Reilly only merited a 2.6 rating.

At first, it seemed that this statement might be too subjective to fact-check. "Out of control" is not an easily measurable quality. However, the data showed that crime in Phoenix has been dropping for several years, a trend which the editors felt was sufficient to debunk O'Reilly's claim.

From Jon Mitchell's verdict: (on behalf of Truthsquad editors)
This statement would have been difficult to fact-check, if the data had been more ambiguous. O'Reilly's statement that crime is "out of control" would ordinarily be open to subjective interpretation. However, the only sources that corroborated O'Reilly's statement seemed clearly biased, and trustworthy sources, including the Phoenix Police Department and the FBI, indicated that crime in Phoenix has been dropping steadily for years. ... Bill O'Reilly's assertion that crime in Phoenix is "out of control" would require at least a measurable increase in crime to be considered factual."
See full verdict »

"Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same"
under the Affordable Care Act.
By Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Our verdict: HALF TRUE
67 answers

Links to some related articles suggested that Sebelius' statement was technically true, and many of our participants agreed. Jim Lang wrote that "the term 'guaranteed Medicare benefits' allows it to be true." Indeed, no Obama administration spokesperson we came across discussed this point without appending the word "guaranteed," which editor Kelly McBride considered "slippery." Lynn Caporale clarified the meaning of this buzzword, pointing out that only "the extra subsidies to the Medicare Advantage plans" will be cut, which Barry Parr contends "are clearly not 'Medicare' under any reasonable definition." Thanks to the word "guaranteed," many people felt Sebelius was in fair territory. But other members rejected the administration's claims entirely. Morriss Moore wrote that "the health plan will limit health care, second opinions, and will have 'panels' to determine the amount of care one receives."

Due to the lack of clarity in Sebelius' wording, Truthsquad editors could not consider the statement to be true. Fabrice Florin wrote in his verdict on behalf of editors that "because this quote is partly misleading, we give it a rating of 'Half True'. We think the Obama administration could have been clearer and more forthcoming on this point."
See full verdict »

"The 'Bush tax cuts' ... remain the single largest cause
of America's structural deficit."
By Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
Our verdict: TRUE
65 answers

This quote proved contentious, and some members vehemently disagreed with 48 who voted "True." Zakaria's claim is not a neat statement of fact. The tax cuts may be the largest component of the deficit, but that does not necessarily make them the cause.

As a result, answers to this Truthsquad seemed to be partly influenced by the political views of some participants. For Tyson Emmett, the operative word in Zakaria's statement was "cause." He argued, "Spending causes deficits. The underlining cause of every deficit is needing more than you have." On the other hand, Chris Strosser asked, "How can Republicans complain about deficit when the Bush tax cuts are the largest chunk?"

Rather than inflame a political debate, the editors focused on the data. A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that, if the loss in revenue due to the tax cuts is measured as a cost, it dwarfs all other structural programs in the budget, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the tax cuts are an elective part of the budget, the judges concluded that Zakaria's statement is "True."
See full verdict »

The environmental impacts of the BP oil spill "have been
much less than everyone feared."
By Jacqueline Michel, Geochemist
Our verdict: MOSTLY TRUE
33 answers

This was one of the hardest quotes to fact-check, because it is not a statement of fact, but "an opinion about an opinion." Many participants pointed out the ambiguity of this quote, and over a third of the 33 respondents selected "Not Sure." In their answers, people highlighted three major reasons for withholding a verdict. Eric Yendall succinctly summarized one with a question: "Who exactly is 'everyone?'" Another problem with the statement is that, as Steve Myers pointed out, "it's too early to tell." Finally, in Joey Baker's words, "we have no idea what impacts everyone feared."

However, after reviewing the evidence, the editors declared a verdict of "Mostly True," accounting for the ambiguity of the statement, acknowleging that the outcome is not yet certain, but pointing to a range of scientific opinions that damage from the spill has been less than expected, compared to previous undersea oil disasters.

From Kelly McBride's verdict: (on behalf of Truthsquad editors)
"It appears true that many scientists and other experts say out loud that they are pleasantly surprised by the resiliency of the gulf, the beaches and the wetlands. There have been hundreds of oil-soaked birds, not thousands. Oil on the beaches has washed up in much smaller amounts than predicted. Very few injured or dead mammals have been recovered. The oil appears to be breaking down and evaporating more quickly that was thought possible. ... So the environmental impact of the spill is in fact not as bad - at this point in time - as experts thought it would be. However, almost every respectable expert qualifies that statement by cautioning a wait-and-see attitude."
See full verdict »

Stats
Here are some of the quantitative results of the weeklong Truthsquad pilot, from Aug. 2 to Aug. 8th, 2010.

Traffic:

• Pageviews for Truthsquad: 12,801
• Unique visitors: 3,723 (est.)
• Most viewed quote: Dick Morris on Immigration (960 pageviews)
• Most answered quote: Orrin Hatch on Health Care (119 answers)
• Most active day: Monday, 8/2 (197 answers)

Participation totals:

• Total participants: 307
• Total answers: 528
• Total links posted: 132
• Total links viewed: 572
• Total links reviewed: 241
• Total changed answers: 57
  (people who changed their minds based on new factual evidence)

Participation averages:

• Average answers/quote: 44
• Average answers/person: 1.81
• Average views of links/person: 1.76
• Average reviews/person: 0.79

Survey Responses
On Tuesday, Aug. 10th, we sent out a survey to all Truthsquad participants to seek their feedback. Early survey responses were generally favorable. In the first day after our survey went out, most survey respondents found the service useful or very useful -- and nearly half picked Truthsquad as their favorite service from NewsTrust this year.

Here are some sample quotes from these early responses:

• "Good oversight, with backup info on both sides. Liked the mix of liberal and conservative statements."


• "It gave a sense of mission - perhaps more so than regular NewsTrust reviewing."


• "I like that we - the people - are reviewing the statements versus 'journalists'."
  
  
• "Enjoyed having my cognitions tested. Checking stories takes a lot of time."
  
  
• "As far as politics go, I don't see how anyone can get at the truth other than to do their own factual research."
  
  
• "I was hoping that people would contribute and comment on matters they are either experts in or have direct knowledge of."


• "Not interested in being a journalist, editor, or fact checker. I just want a service that helps me find good journalism. Rating an article after I've read it is quick and low-cost to me. But fact checking is too much like real work."


• "The editors' section was quick, well-written and to the point. I also liked that participants were also checking ... the editors."


• "There are some people with the time and enthusiasm to undertake the work, and they should be compensated for that effort. I am not one of them, and have no problem contributing a few $$/month to fund that activity."
  
  
• "I'm totally won over by TruthSquad - I think it has a LOT of potential."

Thanks to our partners and advisors
We're deeply grateful to our amazing partners at the Poynter Institute and advisor at FactCheck.org for their invaluable contributions to this project. 

In particular, we would like to thank Kelly McBride, Steve Myers and Julie Moos at Poynter Institute -- as well as Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org. Heartfelt thanks to you all for making this project possible!

We asked our partners and advisors to share their general observations on why they participated in this pilot, what they learned from this experiment, what they found most and least useful about this approach -- and any other insights about this project.

Here are FactCheck.org director Brooks Jackson's personal comments about Truthsquad:

"FactCheck.org participated in this project because ordinary citizens need more help than they're getting from traditional news media to sort through the vast amount of disinformation to which they are exposed via the Internet and 24-hour cable talk networks. So far I would say the experiment is off to a solid start. The "verdicts" of the Truthsquad editors seem to me to be reasonable and based on good research. I'll be interested to learn how much of the research is the work of the "crowd" and how much comes from Truthsquad's paid staff.

One important observation. Even this brief initial experience has produced some pretty dramatic evidence of the limitations of crowd sourcing. The experience checking the Washington Times statement regarding a CitiGroup bonus shows that amateurs searching the Internet sometimes can't match the results obtained by an experienced staff reporter using old-fashioned shoe leather. In that case, one call to the reporter (or to Lew) might have produced the documentation needed to prove the accuracy of the claim."

Kelly McBride offered these thoughts as one of our editors on Truthsquad:

"It seems based on this pilot that citizens can learn fact-checking skills quite easily. The challenge is to motivate them to do this occasionally.

Some people love to do this stuff, but most are simply too busy. Adding more social gaming elements so folks accumulate points and prizes and compete against their friends - that might inspire some people."

Read Kelly's own report on Poynter: Truthsquad Shows We Can 'Crowdfight' Culture of Misinformation

Steve Myers also shared his reflections on being a Truthsquad editor:

"The Truthsquad showed the opportunities and challenges of crowdsourcing. It's possible to fact-check many of the statements that are made every day in the media. But will people go to the effort to dig it up? Some will; some won't.

Many of the users seemed to respond based on their preconceptions -- who said it, how the statement aligned with their political views and what news outlet published it. Some people were upfront about this; they said because Bill O'Reilly said this or the Washington Times reported that, that is why they ruled the way they did.

And yet some people did take an interest and dug in to find the material online. When I ran into a roadblock in researching something, someone else picked up where I left off and found the correct document, read it, and drew a conclusion that I ended up agreeing with.

In writing a couple of verdicts, I was acutely aware of the judgment calls I was making -- what was the underlying fact that had to be proven or disproven, for instance. The most important judgment call: how much weight should I assign to something that was perhaps grammatically or technically correct but misleading? These quotes proved the cliche that there's a grain of truth in every untruth."

Thanks to our funders
This project was made possible in part by a generous grant from Omidyar Network, which funded a six-month investigation of new ways to help people separate fact from fiction online. We're very grateful for their support, as well as to the MacArthur Foundation and our other funding partners at Ashoka and the Ayrshire Foundation.

The Ford Foundation also contributed indirectly to this project, through its support of Poynter's Sense-Making Project, which led to the participation of Kelly McBride and Steve Meyers.

Thanks to our participants and team
Our deepest thanks go to all our participants in this Truthsquad, as well as thousands of new visitors -- and hundreds of new members who signed up during our pilot. These new participants came from across party lines and seemed to integrate well with the NewsTrust community. Many thanks as well to our contributing editors Joey Baker, Kaizar Campwala, Kristin Gorski and Derek Hawkins, Jim Lang and many more for their inspiring participation in this project.

Last but not least, we are very grateful to our worldclass web development team, for their wonderful work in building Truthsquad: Subramanya Sastry, Caleb Waldorf, David Fox, created another great application of the NewsTrust platform in just a month, with the support of our staff editors Jon Mitchell and Kaizar Campwala. We're very lucky to have such a great team!

Next steps
This first pilot has given us a sense of what's possible -- and introduced our community to the discipline of factual verification, under the guidance of professionals from Poynter and Factcheck. Going forward, we will be posting new quotes to fact-check every Wednesday for the next few months (suggestions welcome: email us at truthsquad-at-newstrust-dot-net). But we can do better. Based on the positive response to this pilot, we would like to offer the Truthsquad service on an ongoing basis (we own the truthsquad.com domain).

To that end, we are looking for additional funds to provide Truthsquad on a daily basis this fall, through the mid-term elections. If you would like to support this project, please consider a donation to NewsTrust. Your contribution will help fight the rising tide of spin and misinformation on the Internet, as well as train citizens to evaluate the credibility of the news and information they find online.

We hope that Truthsquad can provide a useful fact-checking solution to the public, as well as help us all become more discerning about the news we consume.

Thanks for checking out Truthsquad!

-- by Fabrice Florin and Jon Mitchell, for the NewsTrust Team

 

Photo Credits: Fox News, News One, Associated Press, Good and Getty Images