NewsTrust - Blog Archive

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

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

Introducing Truthsquad

How can you tell fact from fiction on the Internet? Join the Truthsquad, a community fact-checking experiment led by NewsTrust, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute, our advisors at FactCheck.org -- and the generous support of Omidyar Network and MacArthur Foundation.

UPDATE: Check our full report about Truthsquad on the NewsTrust blog.

For our first pilot the week of August 2nd, 2010, we invited our members to help fact-check controversial quotes from politicians and pundits. Each day of that week, our editors featured daily quotes to research, and asked the community whether they were true or false. These short quotes were excerpted from recent news reports, opinions or political ads suggested by our community and partners.

Each quote page displayed links to factual evidence that supported or opposed the statement. We invited our community to review these links before giving an answer. We encouraged participants to change their answers at any time, as we all found more facts and posted new links. We also held lively discussions of the quotes in the comment sections.

Throughout this pilot, we updated this blog post to add more stories to fact-check and share our verdict. Our Truthsquad overview page now lists twelve controversial quotes for review. If you haven't already, you are welcome to fact-check them as well. Before you do, be sure to read our FAQ and the 'Learn More' section below (and try not to read the verdicts on this page).

We will post the overall pilot results and our findings on our blog on Wed. August 11th.

Each Wednesday this month, we will also post a new quote to fact-check. What should we research next? Suggest a quote for next week’s Truthsquad to "editors-at-newstrust-dot-net."

If you would like to support this project, please make a donation, so we can can continue to provide this service through the end of the year.

Learn More
For more detailed instructions on how to participate in Truthsquad, read our FAQ. To learn more about fact-checking and finding good journalism online, we invite you to read our guides, especially these:

• Tools of the Trade from FactCheckEd.org (video)
• PolitiFact's Guide to Fact-checking from PolitiFact (video)
• Crap Detection 101 from Howard Rheingold (NewsTrust board member)
• Think Like A Journalist from Michael Bugeja (NewsTrust advisor)

SPOILER ALERT: Be sure to answer the quotes listed on our Truthsquad overview page before you read the verdicts below.

Truthsquad Verdicts
Each day during our pilot, the Truthsquad editors (Fabrice Florin, Kelly McBride, Jon Mitchell and Steve Myers) evaluated our collective answers. We gave our verdict when we had enough factual evidence to pronounce a quote true or false.

Here are our verdicts for the twelve quotes we fact-checked during this pilot.

• "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


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


• Environmental impact of the oil spill "much less than everyone feared."
  By Jacqueline Michel, Geochemist
  Our verdict: MOSTLY TRUE


• "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


• "Meek lobbied for big tobacco against children's healthcare."
  By Jeff Greene (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate
  Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE


• "Warren Buffett called Greene's scheme 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
  By Kendrick Meek (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate
  Our verdict: FALSE


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


• "Norton pushed the largest tax hike in Colorado history."
  By Americans For Job Security
  Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE


• Obama's choice for budget chief "received more than $900,000 from Citigroup"
  By Jim McElhatton, The Washington Times
  Our verdict: TRUE


• "CIA and Google investing in "a company that monitors the web... to predict the future."
  By Noah Shachtman, Wired
  Our verdict: TRUE


• "Crime is totally out of control" in Phoenix
  By Bill O'Reilly, Fox News
  Our verdict: FALSE


• "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
  Our verdict: FALSE

Correction: We have amended our verdict for the Washington Times story stating that Jacob Lew, Obama's choice for budget chief, received a $900,000 bonus from Citigroup. We now conclude that this statement is TRUE, after verifying factual evidence from the State Department, which supports that claim. Our original verdict for this claim was "Half True." We regret any inconvenience which our preliminary verdict may have caused.

What do you think?
How do you like Truthsquad? Add your comments below, or email your comments and suggestions to "feedback-at-newstrust.net," after you've tried fact-checking some of the quotes from our first pilot. What were your first impressions? What do you like most? least? what could be improved? which of these quotes do you find most interesting? were they easy or hard to answer?

Next steps
Now that this pilot is over, we will analyze the results and raise funds for more Truthsquads in the fall. During that time, we will continue to post a new quote every Wednesday, on the Truthsquad overview page.

What should we fact-check next? If you come across a good quote to research on Truthsquad, please email it to our editors at "editors-at-newstrust.net." We're looking for short, recent quotes from politicians or pundits, on public interest topics in the news. These should be 'statements of fact' (not opinions). Our members should be able to verify it on their own, by checking links to factual evidence supporting or opposing each statement. Quotes should be no longer than thirty-five words, and the full text of the quote should available online, from a trusted source.

Thanks to our Team, Partners and Community
Many thanks to our worldclass team, for their wonderful work in building Truthsquad: Subramanya Sastry, Caleb Waldorf, David Fox, Jon Mitchell and Kaizar Campwala created another great application of the NewsTrust platform in just a month.

Many thanks as well to our whole community, who helped us design this service through surveys, emails and phone conferences over the past two years. We're very grateful to all our members, advisors, partners and friends who took the time to propose new ideas, check our early designs, test our site and share their invaluable feedback.

Thanks to our Partners and Funders
We also really appreciate the great support of our partners at the Poynter Institute (Kelly McBride, Steve Myers and Julie Moos) and our advisors at FactCheck.org (Brooks Jackson), for collaborating with us on this experiment.

Last but not least, we're deeply grateful to our backers at Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation for their wonderful support of this project. Thanks to them, Truthsquad offers a whole new way for citizens to inform and engage each other on public issues, and tell apart fact from fiction on the web.

Make a donation

Donate today so we can host more programs like Truthsquad in the fall.

We hope that Truthsquad can provide a useful fact-checking solution to the public, as well as help participants like us become more discerning about what the news they get on the web. This first pilot should give us all an introduction to the discipline of factual verification, under the guidance of professionals from Poynter and Factcheck. If this pilot is successful, we are prepared to offer the Truthsquad service on an ongoing basis in the fall (we own the truthsquad.com domain).

Thanks for your interest in Truthsquad!

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

Try our new review tools

We just launched a new version of the NewsTrust review tools, to make it easier and faster for you to check and review stories on our site.

Our new review form (see screenshot) features big buttons with two choices per question. For example, we ask if a story is 'fair' or 'unfair' (instead of asking you to rate the fairness of that story on a scale of 1 to 5). Our current rating form continues to work the same of for existing reviewers, and you can easily switch between versions (use the drop-down menu at the top right of any review form).

We also streamlined our toolbar to provide a better user experience for new visitors and experienced members alike. You can now quickly view story info, star stories you like, and share them on Facebook, Twitter or email, straight from the toolbar. Our improved popup window offers the same features for sites that don't support the toolbar.

What's New
Here are some of the new features in this release:

New Review Form

• simple review form for new members
• big buttons with positive/negative answers for simple form (instead of 1-5 ratings) 
• compact format shows short review form by default, with only three questions
• help balloons show quick review tips when you mouse over question marks 
• expanded review section lets you add notes, comments, quotes and links
• larger text box with a lot more room for writing notes or comments
• current rating form still available for experienced reviewers
• drop-down menu lets you switch quickly between review forms 
• saved settings show the same review form you used last time (expanded or not)
• no more "guest reviews" to reduce confusion and spam - only members can review now

New Toolbar & Popup

• new toolbar has been streamlined to a single line, to reduce visual clutter
• star icon lets you bookmark stories you like, and add them to your picks widget 
• story info tab lets you get more information about the story you are viewing
  
• edit info button lets trusted members (with a level of 3 or more) edit story information
  
• share buttons let you quickly share stories on Facebook, Twitter, Email and more
• login link makes it easy to login or logout from the toolbar (or popup window) 
• popup window offers the same features for sites that don't support our toolbar

New Review Form
Our new review form is shown by default to new members, to help them get started as reviewers. But many experienced reviewers may also find it helpful. 

This simplified review form features big buttons with two choices per question: for example, we ask if a story is fair or unfair (instead of asking you to rate the fairness of that story on a scale of 1 to 5). We also offer help balloons with quick review tips when you roll over question mark buttons.

The new review form is also more compact. To quickly add a note, quote or link -- or share your review with your friends -- just click on Expand your review (see expanded view). This lets you add notes, comments, quotes and links -- using a larger text box with a lot more room for writing your reviews.

You are welcome to keep using our original rating form, if you prefer (we now call it "rating form" to distinguish it from the new review form). To switch between review forms, simply click on the drop-down menu at the top right of any form (shown to the right). This lets you preview all of our review tools. When you see a review form that you like, simply click on the yellow 'Save' button to update your settings. You can change your review settings as often as you like.

Lastly, we have discontinued "guest reviews" by non-members, to reduce confusion and spam. Going forward, you must be a registered member to review stories on NewsTrust, and you need to login before you can use the review form.

 

New Toolbar & Popup Windows
We also streamlined our toolbar to provide a better user experience for new visitors and experienced members alike.

You can now quickly view story info, star stories you like, or share them via Facebook, Twitter, or email, straight from the toolbar. Our improved popup window offers the same features for sites that don't support the toolbar.

To learn more about these new features, check our Toolbar Visual Guide.

Try it out for yourself! Click here to review a sample story using our new review form.

Note that if you don't like this new form, you can you can easily switch back to our current rating form, which still works the same as before (use the drop-down menu at the top right of any review form). 

Go check out all these new features on our site and let us know what you think. Be sure to click on any yellow 'Review' button next to any story title to see our new review form, with all its bells and whistles.

Thanks to our Team
Many thanks to our wonderful web development team: David Fox, Subramanya Sastry and Caleb Waldorf created a much improved user experience in just a few weeks. This core team was supported by our editorial staff members Kaizar Campwala and Jon Mitchell, who worked beyond the call of duty to make this new review tool possible. Thank you all for a job well done!

Our new review tools were designed with the help of our community, through a variety of surveys, emails and conversations this year. We're very grateful to all our members, advisors, partners and friends who took the time to check our early designs, test our site and share their invaluable feedback.

Please share your comments, suggestions at the bottom of this page - or email us. What do you like most? what do you like least? did you experience any bugs? how can we improve these new review tools?

Thanks again to all our supporters for making this community effort possible. We hope that these new tools and enhanced user experience will make it easier for all of us to find and share good journalism together -- and make more informed decisions as citizens.

Enjoy!

Fabrice Florin
Executive Director, NewsTrust

The Future of Energy: News Hunt Results

 From June 7 to 20, 2010, NewsTrust hosted an Energy News Hunt to find good (and bad) journalism about the future of energy -- with a focus on low carbon technologies and innovative solutions that can scale quickly to power the whole planet. (see earlier blog post)

Our partners for this News Hunt were The Long Now Foundation and its Long News initiative. Our hosts were Kirk Citron, Mike LaBonte, Jon Mitchell and Beth Wellington. Kaizar Campwala was managing editor and Fabrice Florin was executive editor.  

Overview
Each day during this two-week News Hunt, we reviewed stories on a new energy source: solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, biofuels and fusion. We also researched related topics, such as the BP oil spill and energy efficiency. Our findings for each of these topics are summarized below. During that period, we reviewed over 260 stories about the future of energy, 129 of which received a NewsTrust rating, with a total of 774 individual reviews during that period. Posted stories were published by over 120 separate news sources.

Together, these stories helped us better understand some of the many challenges and opportunities related to the future of energy. As scientists, businesses and governments around the world look for scalable alternatives to fossil fuels in the next few decades, it appears that many clean energy sources can play a role to offset peak oil -- and yet they all have their own limitations. Based on what we found as a community, the future of energy is likely to be made of a patchwork of many different technologies, as our society struggles to generate terrawatts (not just gigawatts) to power our global needs.

Throughout the News Hunt, we found some great journalism about energy, but were also struck by the scarcity of comprehensive, in-depth, well sourced and contextual news coverage of this topic. Many of the straight news reports we reviewed tended to be superficial and focused more on the "problem box" (e.g.: BP oil spill), rather than the "solution box" (e.g.: clean and scalable energy sources). Popular science publications usually provided better coverage of possible solutions than general news outlets, but often relied on a single source (e.g.: the scientists whose work was being featured in the story). We also found many opinions and advocacy pieces that were more thoroughly researched than news reports, but they typically favored their own viewpoints. Thanks to our focus on "long news", we were able to go back several years to find better information. This was the first News Hunt where we didn't restrict ourselves to recent news stories, and it was a liberating experience: though some of the stories we found were a bit dated, the overall quality of their coverage usually made up for this time lag.

Here's what Long News editor Kirk Citron thought about this Energy News Hunt:

"The Long News project looks for news stories that might matter in the long term; obviously, the search for energy will be one of the great challenges of this century. We wanted to run this News Hunt now in the hope that the current BP oil spill crisis might help prompt a broader conversation about possible alternative sources. There was good news on many fronts - we found a lot of high quality journalism; we had participation from a large number of NewsTrust and Long Now Foundation members, bringing in news sources from around the world; and finally, there was a surprising amount of good news in the news stories themselves, as you'll read below."

Recommended Stories
Here are some of our top rated stories for this News Hunt:

NEWS

• European Dream of Desert Energy Takes Shape - Der Spiegel
• How Texas Lassoed the Wind - Scientific American
• Water Adds New Constraints to Power - New York Times
• This Machine Might* Save the World - Popular Science
• Nuclear Energy Guide - Council on Foreign Relations
• The rise of Big Solar: Growing pains - Economist
• Exxon $600 Million Algae Investment Makes Khosla See Pipe Dream - Bloomberg
• Geothermal Power - Wikipedia

OPINIONS

• Big Oil can't get beyond petroleum - Washington Post
• The Case For and Against Nuclear Power - Wall Street Journal
• Climate Change Recalculated - The Long Now Foundation
• What happens when energy resources deplete? - The Oil Drum
• Goodbye, bullet trains and windmills - Salon
• A 2-Cent Solution to Help Fuel an Energy Quest - New York Times
• Bill Gates on nuclear energy: Innovating to zero - TED
• Obama signals need for new energy agenda - Grist
• An Energy-Independent Future - Daily Show

For a full listing of stories evaluated in this Energy News Hunt, check all stories we reviewed, as well as our least trusted stories -- these stories were all reviewed between June 7 and 20, 2010, regardless of their publication dates. More recent stories can be found on our Energy topic page.

Solar Energy
As we found out in this News Hunt, solar radiation is by far the most abundant energy source on earth (The Oil Drum), exceeding global energy demand many times over. But at its current capacity, solar power generation can only produce a tiny fraction of the world's total electricity supply (Wikipedia). However, according to The MIT Technology Review, the market continues to grow rapidly, especially in the U.S., and the industry has begun to employ a range of technologies, from next-generation photovoltaic cells to solar thermal generation using heat, to capture and harness more solar power.

And yet these advances appear limited by their high costs and the large amount of physical space they require, making solar unlikely to become a leading source of new energy in the near future. As our partner and reviewer Alexander Rose points out: "This should be put in perspective. Solar currently represents less than 1% of the total energy mix."

Recommended Stories

• The rise of Big Solar: Growing pains - The Economist
• European Dream of Desert Energy Takes Shape - Der Spiegel
• How home solar arrays can help to stabilize the grid - Scientific American

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Solar Energy topic page.

Wind Power
 As we learned from over forty articles we reviewed on this topic, wind power is less costly than solar, and doesn't require the large upfront investments needed for nuclear and geothermal. And scientists, governments, and private companies appear to be tackling many of the issues that previously stunted the growth of wind energy, as demonstrated in Texas, where "a unique state energy policy combined with federal subsidies have helped make this state an important test case for scalable wind power deployment," as noted by Fabrice Florin.

We also read about several schemes to store wind energy, including the use of compressed air, pumped hydro, and even a piece in the New York Times about battery storage (which co-host Mike LaBonte noticed contained "three viewpoints, but only from the subject company and one customer"). A number of sources also covered an ambitious offshore wind proposal spanning the eastern United States, that could harness stronger, more consistent winds, while "eliminating aesthetic and noise concerns that have delayed [past] projects." As with other alternative energy sources, government support has been critical to the growth of wind, but there's increased interest in wind from the private sector, boding well for the future of this technology.

Recommended Stories

• How Texas Lassoed the Wind - Scientific American
• Eritrea: Reaping the wind - IRIN
• Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal - Wired

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Wind Power topic page.

Nuclear Power
We found much controversy in the stories we reviewed about nuclear power. Is nuclear energy the clean, safe alternative to fossil fuel's finite supplies and carbon emissions? Or is it unsafe and too expensive to build? Critics say the timeline for conversion to nuclear power is too long, that investments divert resources from other technologies that work. They point to dangers involved in uranium mining, plant operations, nuclear waste disposal and the possible use of nuclear material for weapons. Proponents say that nuclear power has become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. They tout its lower cost per kilowatt, its baseload, always-on character, as opposed to intermittent solar and wind -- and point to "fourth generation" reactors which use nuclear waste as fuel.

The Council of Foreign Relations lays out the arguments both pro and con in its "Nuclear Energy Guide", which Sirajul Islam calls "a good resource." A number of stories report on the benefits of a "nuclear renaissance," such as this article from MarketWatch -- while NASA climate scientist James Hansen supports the use of fourth generation reactors. Other stories point to some serious side-effects, such as "Nuclear power & public health" which Dwight Rousu calls "a thorough and informative article... from an expert not in the pay of the nuclear industry."

Recommended Stories

• The Future of Nuclear Energy - Scientific American
• The Case For and Against Nuclear Power - Wall Street Journal (Opinion)
• Some Nukes - The New Yorker

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Nuclear topic page.

Geothermal Energy
 Geothermal energy is generated by converting heat from deep within the earth into electricity. We learned in this News Hunt that unlike wind power, geothermal power plants produce a consistent energy load all year round, and have a smaller footprint compared to solar. However, geothermal energy is highly location dependent. "The reason Iceland gets 26% of its power from geo," said Alexander Rose, "is that it is highly geothermally active."

Another hurdle for geothermal power is the significant capital needed to explore and then build geothermal plants. Accessing the heat source requires drilling deep in the ground, a process that "is very nearly as old as the discovery of oil as a fuel source, and is expensive, time-consuming, dangerous and environmentally hazardous." Scientific American's Christopher Mims explained that while geothermal may be cost effective in the long run, the high up-front investment mean "companies are more likely to spend money on things with lower front-end costs, like natural gas-powered plants." Drilling for geothermal power plants also increases the risk of earthquakes, according to Nature.

Recommended Stories

• Using Carbon Dioxide to Extract Geothermal Energy - MIT Technology Review
• Mining Magnate Ross Beaty is Turning to Geothermal - Forbes
• Joining the Energy Underground: Residential Geothermal Power Systems - Scientific American

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Geothermal topic page.

Biofuels
 As we found out in this News Hunt, not all biofuels are created equal. The Guardian points out that producing biofuels from corn and soybeans can drive up the price of food, and the Associated Press explored whether wood-base biofuels could harm woodlands. 

On the horizon are "fourth generation fuels that use techniques like hydroprocessing, advanced biochemistry, and "solar-to-fuel" methods, which were reported on in Scientific American and GreenTech Media. Reviewer Mindy Phypher sounds a note of caution about these new technologies in her Scientific American review, explaining that she has "learned to take glowing reviews of potential breakthroughs with a grain of salt. So many, for one reason or another, never make it to the market or successfully solve the problem they were intended to solve."

Recommended Stories

• Exxon $600 Million Algae Investment Makes Khosla See Pipe Dream - Bloomberg
• Algae to solve the Pentagon's jet fuel problem - Guardian
• EU biofuels 'should be certified' - BBC News

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Biofuels topic page.

Fusion Energy
 Unlike nuclear fission, fusion power forces atoms to join and thus release some of their energy, using only water and other commonly available elements as fuel, as we found out in this News Hunt. A leader in this field is the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs. On June 16, 2010, The Long Now Foundation hosted a talk by NIF director Ed Moses, who described their groundbreaking work (this News Hunt was originally intended as a companion program to this talk). If Moses is right, fusion energy, likely to be driven by the NIF's laser array, could provide clean, abundant electricity to power the planet. 

Some scientists and politicians have expressed skepticism about this technology (Scientific American), and question whether society can bear the cost of development (Bnet). But Long Now founder Stewart Brand points out that "fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission. For the constant baseload power no carbon is involved, no waste stream, no possibility of meltdown or weaponization, and there is no such thing as peak hydrogen."

Recommended Stories

• Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes - BBC News
• This Machine Might Save the World - Popular Science
• Clean Fusion Power This Decade - The Long Now Foundation/NIF (Opinion)

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Fusion Energy topic page.

Energy Efficiency
Energy-efficient buildings, industrial processes and transportation could reduce the world's projected energy needs in 2050 by one third, according to the International Energy Agency. In the U.S., while the size of the economy tripled between 1970 and 2010, 75% of the energy which fueled that expansion came from efficiency advances, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The real challenge seems to be a lack of political will to change energy policy in the United States, as suggested in opinions such as "The Psychology of Climate Change.

In "Europe Energized", Steven Hill looks at how government policy can encourage the adoption of energy alternatives -- and reviewer Chris Finnie found "this piece was not only informative, but inspiring."  Shari Shapiro comments on the proposed Kerry-Lieberman bill in the Green Building Blog, noting that it "took the best, easiest and cheapest means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions - through energy efficiency - and gave them the very short end of the stick." Perhaps the most informative opinion on this topic was by Grist's David Roberts, who covered Robert Lugar's less ambitious bill  in "A bipartisan path forward on energy and climate." 

Recommended Stories

• Europe Energized - New York Times (Opinion)
• A bipartisan path forward on energy and climate - Grist (Opinion)
• As Congress Dithers, Military Provides Leadership On Green Energy - Forbes (Opinion)

Gulf Oil Spill
Our News Hunt coincided with the BP oil spill, which dominated the news and raised urgent questions about this environmental disaster. Coverage of this event ranged from the immediate threats to Gulf Coast residents to the consequences for BP and its shareholders to "longer news" stories about the spill's ecological impact (which reviewer Dale Penn calls "excellent journalism")  and the dim future of fossil fuels as an energy source from The Oil Drum (reviewer Patricia L'Herrou calls it "a fascinating description.")

For this News Hunt, we looked at dozens of stories related to the BP oil spill, hoping to find good information about alternative energy sources that might wean us from fossil fuels. We were often disappointed by the lack of substantive coverage about viable solutions to the upcoming energy crisis.

Recommended Stories

• In gulf oil spill's long reach, ecological damage could last decades - The Washington Post
• Lasting Menace - Scientific American (Opinion)
• Energy Transitions Past and Future - The Oil Drum (Opinion)

See all stories we reviewed on this topic. More recent stories can be found on our Oil and Gas topic page.

Bad Journalism on Energy
As always, we try to highlight examples of bad journalism here at NewsTrust, and we found plenty of them in this News Hunt. The usual suspects did not disappoint, with Glenn Beck's associates Pat & Stu offering a review of President Obama's June 15th primetime address, leading reviewer Richard Williams to write: "If we look at this as an opinion piece delivered by comics, it wasn't half bad. If we look at it as 'journalism,' we're barking up the wrong tree."). We were also concerned by Keith Olbermann's interview with Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard at MSNBC.

This Energy News Hunt also uncovered a particular kind of bad journalism, in which lazy writing allows the wow-factor of a new technological development to overwhelm critical reporting and thorough investigation, as noted above.

Least Trusted Stories

• Using oil to focus energy - Hardball / MSNBC (Opinion)
• Obama unleashes big government - The Glenn Beck Program (Opinion)
• US lab debuts super laser - AFP

See all our least trusted stories about energy. More recent stories can be found of our Energy topic page.

Thanks to our partners
 We'd like to thank our partners at The Long Now Foundation and its Long News initiative, for participating in this News Hunt. In particular, we're very grateful to these individuals for their special contributions to this project: Stewart Brand, Kirk Citron, Danielle Engelman, Kevin Kelly and Alexander Rose. 

You can read Kirk's own News Hunt report on the Long News blog. And as Long Now's executive director, Alexander shared these observations about our partnership:

"Looking back over what came out of the Energy News Hunt I found that I learned not only more about energy, but a lot more about the way it is covered by the press. I am reminded how rare it is to see a story that contextualizes new energy technology in the overall picture. Crowd-sourcing is a tricky and nuanced business, NewsTrust did a great job framing and directing the efforts of its contributors to yield high quality stories."

This project was made possible in part by a generous grant from Omidyar Network, which is funding 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 our other backers at the MacArthur Foundation, Ashoka and the Ayrshire Foundation.

Thanks to our reviewers
Our deepest appreciation goes to our great hosts Kirk Citron, Mike LaBonte, Jon Mitchell and Beth Wellington, for their thoughtful posts and reviews about the future of energy. We also greatly appreciate their findings in this blog post: Jon wrote about Solar, Fusion, the Gulf Oil Spill and Bad Journalism. Beth wrote about Nuclear, Biofuels and Energy Efficiency. Kaizar wrote about Wind and Geothermal -- and also wrote and edited this blog post, along with Fabrice. Thank you all for your good contributions!

Lastly, we're grateful to all our NewsTrust reviewers for participating in this Energy News Hunt. And a big welcome to over a hundred new members who signed up for this project. We're delighted that you could join us for this fascinating investigation.

This News Hunt and partnership with The Long Now Foundation was a great opportunity to test our evolving "trust network" platform, which enables citizens and journalists to collaboratively filter the news. This demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, as we all worked closely with each other and used all of our tools to learn more about our energy options -- and became more informed and engaged citizens in the process. We look forward to expanding this platform in coming months, and working with you all again very soon!

What do you think?
We would love to hear your thoughts about this News Hunt -- and/or NewsTrust in general. To share your feedback, please leave a comment below, or email us.

-- by Kaizar Campwala and Fabrice Florin, with Jon Mitchell and Beth Wellington

Local News Hunt on New York City

How are the news media covering the local impact of the recession?

To find out, join our first Local News Hunt on New York City.
(Update: see full results in our next blog post)

This week, NewsTrust is turning its spotlight on the Big Apple and its news media: we are looking for good (and bad) journalism on how the recession is affecting people in New York City.

Our partners for this pilot are the Huffington Post's NYC Portal, its Eyes and Ears team, as well as the New York City magazine City Limits, -- and NewsTrust members like you. From March 29th to April 4th, 2010, we will join forces to rate news media coverage of local economic issues ranging from unemployment to government cutbacks. The following week, we'll feature some of the best and worst coverage we found together, here on the NewsTrust blog.

Joining the News Hunt is easy and fun -- and you can contribute in just minutes, by reviewing stories on our New York City page. You can also post related stories we might have missed on this topic (be sure to type "New York City" in the topic field).

As you review these stories, you will learn more about important local issues, and you will become more aware of the quality of the news you consume. This unique experiment, funded by Omidyar Network , invites citizens and journalists to help survey how different news sources are covering one of the most dynamic cities in America: New York City.

News Hunt Schedule
Here's a day-by-day schedule for this week:

• Monday: Major Dailies/Wires
• Tuesday: Magazines/Independents
• Wednesday: TV/Radio
• Thursday: Online/Blogs
• Friday: Hyperlocal/Boroughs
• Saturday: Bad Journalism

UPDATES: Each day this week, we have updated this blog post with more stories for review, to survey a wide range of news sources covering NYC.

Monday: Major Dailies/Wires

• New York Hospitals Under the Knife - Wall Street Journal
• 12 New York City Council Members Form Liberal Bloc - New York Times
  
• Bronxites takes long rides to stock up at upper West Side food pantry - New York Daily News
  
• Into the void - New York Post
• NYC recession proves shallower than expected - Reuters
• New York Helicopter Commute for $200 a Day Signals Revival - Bloomberg

Tuesday: Magazines/Independents

• Getting From Here To There - City Limits
• In Brooklyn, Mortgage Crisis Eats Away Wealth of Several Generations of Hispanics - El Diario
  
• New York's Ten Worst Landlords - Village Voice
• Building on Health Reform Momentum, NYC Workers Push for Paid Sick Days - In These Times
  

Wednesday: TV/Radio

• The Phantom Token Booth: MTA Cuts Station Agents - WNYC
• Do Charter Schools Worsen Inequality of Two-Tiered Education System? - Democracy Now
  
• In Your Neighborhood: Jobs - WABC 7
• Close to Home - Frontline
  

Thursday: Blogs/Online

• Elder Abuse Programs Must Be Saved - Gotham Gazette
• Time for Developers to Contribute to the City’s Infrastructure Needs - Drum Major Institute
• Judge tells Bloomberg "Not So Fast" - Huffington Post
• Unemployed Over 50: A View from the Ground - Women's Voices for Change
• News Release: "The Arena Can Wait. Affordable Housing Now!" - Develop--Don't Destroy Brooklyn

Friday: Hyperlocal/Boroughs

• Bronx: Bronx Church Fights Gentrification Trend That It Created - Bronx Ink
• Bronx: Residents rail against transit cuts - Hunts Point Express
• Queens: Payment delays on school jobs vex contractors - Your Nabe.com
• Staten Island: Schools chancellor gets an earful - Staten Island Advance
• Brooklyn: Artists Offer a Visual Dialogue on a Changing Brooklyn - Gotham Gazette
• Brooklyn: Unkindest cuts! Boro subways and buses are slashed by the MTA - The Brooklyn Paper
• Manhattan: L.E.S. bus routes will get 'restructured,' and M8, cuts - The Villager

Saturday: Bad Journalism
One of our goals for this news hunt is to identify 'bad journalism' -- stories that are particularly superficial, biased or irresponsible. Are the stories below good or bad journalism?

• IT voucher program looks to brighten job horizon - NY1
• New York is Broke & Broken - New York Post
• New York City Public Schools Launching 'Trayless Tuesdays' - Associated Press
• State Senator Calls For NY To 'Stop The Sag' - WCBS-TV

Join the News Hunt
Help find the best (and worst) in local journalism, and learn about how the recession has affected one of America's most dynamic cities.

To participate in this project, sign up (or login) and review any story our New York City page. Anyone can participate in this collective news evaluation -- even if you don't live in New York.

And if you come across good stories we're missing on this topic, please post them on our site (be sure to tag them "New York City" under Topics, so they will be listed in our News Hunt page).

Please join us for this fascinating experiment, along with our co-hosts Kristin Gorski, Jon Mitchell and Beth Wellington -- and other NewsTrust members like you.

Happy Hunting!

-- by Kaizar Campwala and Fabrice Florin

Introducing MyNews - Your personal news filter

Today, we're happy to announce an exciting new service from NewsTrust:
MyNews™, your personal news filter.

About MyNews
MyNews gathers the news you care about, all in one place. This free service finds stories on topics that matter to you, from sources and people you trust – including news recommendations from your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

It only takes a minute to set up your own MyNews page. Your page is then updated continuously with stories that match your interests. You can easily personalize your page with a full set of filtering tools -- and get it delivered to you by email or RSS.

Give it a try. It's a great way to keep up with the news, and surface quality journalism that matters to you and people you trust.

Try out MyNews
Here's how you can check out MyNews for yourself:

• If you do not yet have a NewsTrust account:
Simply fill our quick signup form on the MyNews welcome page. This will create your special MyNews page -- and make you a member of NewsTrust, our social news network.

• If you already have a NewsTrust account:
Go directly to your own MyNews page, which we just created for you. (you'll need to login first)

Set up MyNews
Getting started with MyNews is easy as pie. Just click on your favorite topics, trusted sources and people you want to follow, in the right column of your MyNews page. You can pick your favorites from our menus -- or type them in by name. Each time you add a new interest, your page will update with new stories that match your selections.

MyNews can also track news links from your own Facebook and Twitter feeds, and follow recommendations from friends in your social networks. The result is a high-quality news feed that is more relevant to you. MyNews filters this collective intelligence with cool personalization tools and NewsTrust ratings, to help you find good journalism online -- and tell it apart from misinformation.

For help tips, check our MyNews FAQ. If you have any questions or comments, email us. We will publish more MyNews tips in our next blog post.

We created MyNews to encourage more people to use NewsTrust as their news filter. We hope that you will find it useful too. If you like this new service, please tell your friends -- and consider a donation to our nonprofit social news network.

Thanks to our Team
Many thanks to our wonderful team, for their amazing work in building MyNews: David Fox, Subramanya Sastry, Caleb Waldorf and Kaizar Campwala created a great new application of the NewsTrust platform in just three months. Many thanks as well to Adam Florin, David Cohn, Derek Hawkins, Ezra Fox, Jonathan Berger and Polly Barden for their invaluable contributions to the design and development of the MyNews service. Thank you all for your creativity, your friendship and your dedication to our cause!

Thanks to our Community
MyNews was designed with the help of our community, through a variety of surveys, emails and phone conferences over the past two years. We're very grateful to all our members, advisors, partners and friends who took the time to propose new ideas, check our early designs, test our site and share their invaluable feedback.

Thanks to our Funders
Last but not least, we're very grateful to our backers at Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation for their wonderful support of this project. MyNews explores new ways for citizens to inform and engage each other on public issues, which is an important goal we share with our funding partners. We have high hopes for this experiment.

Please share your comments and suggestions about MyNews at the bottom of this page - or email us. What do you like most? what do you like least? how can we improve this new service?

Thanks again to everyone for making this collective accomplishment possible. NewsTrust is a living example of how people can collaborate through social networks to find the quality news we all need to make informed decisions as citizens.

Onward!

Fabrice Florin
Executive Director, NewsTrust

____________________________________________

LAUNCH UPDATE 1 (3/18/10)

We're getting a wonderful response to Tuesday's launch of MyNews. So far, over 500 members have tried MyNews, and are following over 7,000 topics, sources, members or feeds on their personal pages. Our pageviews have doubled since last week, and many more folks are reviewing on the site. This is all very exciting! 

Thanks to all of you who have tried out MyNews and given us your great comments and suggestions. Please send more feedback if you can! We'll send our a survey next week. 

Try out MyNews
If you haven't checked MyNews yet, give it a try: here's your own MyNews page, which only takes a minute to set up. It's a great way to track news you care about, following your favorite topics, sources, reviewers and feeds. Enjoy! 

Get MyNews by Email
To get the most of MyNews, we recommend you subscribe to the MyNews Daily Email, which comes out every morning at 6am ET and will help you start your day with fresh news that matter to you. 

Check ReadWriteWeb's Review
Yesterday, the influential tech news site ReadWriteWeb published a great review of MyNews: 'Want to Read Good Journalism? Try NewsTrust's New Personalized Filtering Tool.' Check out this inspiring article, and then take MyNews for a spin. 

Welcome New Members
If you're just joining us here on NewsTrust, welcome aboard! If you're new to the site, we urge you to get started by filling in your member profile, and then finding stories that interest you to read and review. As you review more, your member level will increase, making your reviews count even more.