Fabrice Florin on social news site.

A new innovation in reporting just when the public needs it most.

Muhammad Saleem interviews Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust via telephone. Follow up questions were asked via email

In an age where media reports can no longer be entirely disentangled from political goals and spins, the public’s need for a reliable and trustworthy source of information is growing exponentially. As scandal from the Bush Whitehouse continues to come to light, revealing the fabrication, manipulation, and deletion of vital information that influenced policy and American opinion and votes, the need for such a service has become increasingly clear. NewsTrust, a site founded in 2006 with the goal of identifying quality news and journalism and making it accessible to the general public, is such a site.

In order to escape the pressures of politics, NewsTrust uses a larger and more in depth rating scale to create a database of trusted, well-written articles. The biggest obstacle for such a trailblazing online news site, however, is funding, as it is a non-for-profit organization. The three most likely sources for such funding are donations, advertisements, and business-to-business services.

Muhammad Saleem: You previously mentioned that the initial funding came almost entirely from you and with a little outside help. From there, you mentioned the 3 possible sources of funding as donations, advertisement, and business to business services. You recently implemented Google AdSense - how is that working for you? How are the donations coming along? And, most importantly,how long till we see these business to business services seeing release?

Fabrice Florin: Since the last time we spoke, we've received a number of foundation grants and private donations – from foundations like the Mitch Kapor Foundation, the Ayrshire Foundation and the Tides Foundation, as well as Craig Newmark of Craigslist and other private donors. These donations have provided us with some basic funding that will allow us to operate our beta site at its current level. In order for us to develop the full NewsTrust service, we require additional funding; thus, we are in discussions with a couple large foundations, who we hope to get significant funding from later this year.

We now offer online ads from Google AdSense, which generate a small revenue stream for us right now; as our traffic grows, however, so will our online advertising revenue. Once we set up distribution partnerships with large media groups and online portals, advertising will become a more significant source of revenue for us. Even so, we are pretty happy with the CPM rates we are getting already, which are better than most other online news sites (we generate nearly $2.00 per thousand impressions, while news site CPMs typically average about $0.65). We're finding that our audience is more affluent and educated than typical news sites, which should translate into higher ad revenue.

As far as business-to-business services are concerned, we have started discussions with some prominent media organizations about licensing our news feeds and offering custom services. We hope to announce our first partnerships this fall.

We’re making good progress overall, even though we're non-profit and don't have the same start-up capital as other VC-funded ventures. Despite this, the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together since most people respond favorably to our service's civic mission and quality news feeds.

The following four questions represent email interviews

Q: What do you think the next phase of crowdsourcing will look like? Have we found its true potential?

A: Crowdsourcing is just getting started and shows much promise, but is unlikely to reach its true potential for quite a few years. Some of the first-generation social news networks are still largely based on popularity, rather than information quality, and have a long way to go before they can be used by the public reliably.

The greatest potential for this new medium is likely to lie in the combination of both the "wisdom of editors" and "wisdom of the crowds." Good editors will always be needed to draw out the best information, but quality-based social news networks can be invaluable resources to extend and complement that editorial process. In an ideal scenario, established news publications and quality-based crowdsourcing / social news sites would partner closely with each other, and draw on each other's expertise to further the public interest.

Q: What do you think motivates your contributors? Is it money or some other incentive?

A: NewsTrust contributors are attracted by the benefits offered by our social network:
- quality information feeds
- focus on good journalism
- the recognition that reviewers get for their work
- a sense of belonging to a community of like minds
In the long run, we hope to provide financial compensation to our best contributors. But I don't think that financial compensation will be the primary motivation for participating in a civic quest for quality information.

Q: Do you really think there's wisdom in crowds? If so, what's the clearest example you know of?

A: I believe in the wisdom of the crowds, provided that it is channeled effectively, using methodologies based on shared principles and structured data. For example, our research studies suggest that citizen reviewers using the NewsTrust review tools can evaluate news quality reliably - and just as effectively as experienced journalists.

Check our Website for our latest study results:

Our findings indicate that most respondents can accurately rate the quality of news stories using NewsTrust's review tools - and that even those respondents with limited experience can rate just as reliably as more experienced reviewers.

Also check related findings by the University of Michigan, summarized in this research paper (PDF).

Lampe, C., & Garrett, R. K. (2007). It's All News to Me: The Effect of Instruments on Ratings Provision. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Science (pp. 180b). Waikoloa, Hawaii.
This research suggests that the wisdom of the crowd can help citizens make more informed decisions about their lives and governments. But that requires a disciplined methodology, to pro-actively give citizens the media literacy tools they need to develop an appreciation for quality information over populist entertainment.

Q: What surprised you the most with your project?

A: We're finding that combining amateur crowdsourcing with professional journalism seems to offer the best results for a social news site like NewsTrust.

When citizens and journalists collaborate, everybody wins. Experienced journalists can provide the invaluable know-how and investigative techniques that help citizens become more discriminatory readers and researchers; in turn, citizens can amplify and extend a journalist's expertise by applying these techniques to filter a much larger body of information overall than professionals could cover as a group. The end-result is higher quality information, and more informed citizens, both of which are needed to make democracy thrive.

NewsTrust is different in that it provides the best of both worlds, involving both users and editors in a quality-based evaluation process, which takes the expertise of a few professionals and amplifies it by training larger groups of citizen volunteers to use such state-of-the-art information review tools. In addition, we also use sophisticated computer algorithms to weigh member ratings based on expertise and trust level.

Q: I was looking at NewsTrust's traffic numbers and while traffic is up a little bit since we last spoke, it remains largely unchanged with the exception of two very prominent spikes, one occurring sometime in November and another one towards the end of December: Here.

Could you shed some light on these spikes, and the state of NewsTrust traffic (a measure of the service's acceptance) over the past 6 months?

A: Our traffic has held steady since we launched our beta site last November, but is still modest during this beta stage. This is largely due to the fact that we have not been actively promoting the site as it is still under development. Most of the publicity we are getting is simply via word of mouth.

That said, we think that membership growth is a better measure of our progress than number of page views. Since we launched last November, our membership has tripled, with over 4,500 registered members today (76% of whom also subscribe to our daily newsletters). More importantly, we generate over 3,500 new story reviews per month, and that number keeps climbing.

It's also worth noting that NewsTrust members show unusually high levels of education and journalistic experience: about 76% of our members have a college degree, and about 25% have 5 years or more of news experience, based on a survey of NewsTrust member profiles. This might explain why our story listings seem more reliable than popularity-based news sites like Digg.

To answer your question about our traffic spikes in November and December, the first spike was caused by the launch of our public beta site on November 28th, which was covered by many news outlets. The second spike is a result of an article about us in the San Jose Mercury News, which was picked up by the popular blog site Boing Boing.

And just last week, we experienced a third spike, caused by a link on Glenn Reynold's InstaPundit blog. We're very grateful to Glenn for inviting his readers to join NewsTrust. InstaPundit readers tend to share libertarian views, which balance out the liberal views shared by many current NewsTrust members. With over 500 new members from InstaPundit, our site now reflects a much wider range of political viewpoints, which is a very healthy development.

Later in the year, we hope to announce partnerships with large media organizations, which would significantly increase our overall traffic, and attract new members with a variety of political views. By focusing on facts, not just opinions, we hope NewsTrust can bring Americans closer together, allowing us to all learn from each other, across all dividing lines.

Q: Last time you said that you were in favor of a voluntary code of ethics and that it was to the sector's advantage to put forth such a code. Keeping in mind the Kathy Sierra situation, O'Reilly's draft bloggers' code of conduct and how the blogosphere reacted to it. What do you think now?

A: I still think that a code of ethics is helpful for publications that provide news coverage and other forms of journalism. Such a code can clarify a publication's intentions and editorial practices for both readers and contributors. Similarly, it is also helpful for a news site to disclose its privacy policy, comments policy and terms of service. But most bloggers consider themselves conversationalists, not journalists, and are generally not supportive of initiatives like Bill O'Reilly's proposed code of conduct. I think it's fair to say that the blogosphere is still in early stages of development, and its community behaves much like the Wild West. Until the whole industry matures a bit, things are likely to remain that way. But over time, serious bloggers who practice journalism will probably find that a code of ethics or policy statements can add value to their sites.

In the meantime, it becomes more important for news monitoring sites like NewsTrust to help people find out more about publications they're not familiar with. Already, NewsTrust publishes a reputation database for hundreds of mainstream and independent news sources, in order to help the public identify trustworthy publications. We will keep expanding this online knowledge base about the news media so that citizens can make more informed decisions about their lives and governments.

We're also considering a NewsTrust "seal of approval" and source certification program, based on independent reviews of news publications by our members and editors. Publications that meet our standards for journalistic practices could display our seal of approval on their sites (a bit like TrustE does to confirm a site's privacy policy). For some organizations, a NewsTrust certification badge could be helpful in attracting new readers. And this could become a valuable business-to-business service for NewsTrust over time.

Q: I see many new features on NewsTrust, including (most importantly) a much more transparent and robust content rating system, based on the following:

1. Recommendations
2. Accuracy
3. Balance
4. Context
5. Evidence
6. Fairness
7. Importance
8. Information
9. Sources
10. Style
11. Trust

Could you shed some more light on the new features that have been implemented over the last few months, as well as provide some more insight into your content rating system?

A: Over the past few months, we have implemented a number of features to help people find and share quality journalism on NewsTrust.

These features enhance each of our free NewsTrust services: News Listings: daily feed of top rated news and opinion listings Review Tools: news literacy tools for evaluating good journalism Community Tools: new ways to discuss civic issues with other citizens Source Ratings: reputation database of news providers, with trust ratings
Here are some of our new features for each of these services: new listings (http://beta.newstrust.net), review tools (http://beta.newstrust.net/buttons/), community tools, and source ratings (http://beta.newstrust.net/sources).


Read More >>
5/17/07