NewsTrust: Good News Online?

Looking for good news online? A new website promises to offer "news you can trust."

News aggregator sites that link to articles from different sources on the web aren’t new, but they provide little basis for judging how newsworthy, balanced, or original the articles they link to are. Even worse, they can act as fronts for astroturf and blogspam by directing a lot of attention to misleading headlines or anonymous sources.

Reader Lewis O’Neil forwarded a link to NewsTrust, a new service created to evaluate news. Its users rank not just the article, but also its writer and the news source that publishes it. The intent is not just to spread a list of popular links, but to provide a trusted ranking for online news based on the journalistic quality of articles: accuracy, fairness, relevance, and the reputation of its news source.

Mike LaBonte, a NewsTrust user, says the site enables him to “make my own personal contribution to the Fourth Estate, not by writing more news but by helping to find the gems already out there, drowning in a sea of information overload.”

The project is lead by former journalist Fabrice Florin, a veteran of media content production and founder of Apple's Multimedia Lab. Florin also worked to Macromedia to launch shockwave.com and in wireless content publishing for mobile phones at HandTap.

After a six month private pilot, the site opened in beta just last week. It presents news under topics from science and technology to business and politics, and presents articles both on its web page and using RSS feeds.

A recommended visit: http://beta.NewsTrust.net

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