ROUGH DRAFT

750 words

NEWSTRUST

The future of journalism is, at best, unclear.

The New York Times has released a plan that allows online readers to get access to up to 20 articles a month for free, and requires that anyone wishing to view more than 20 articles a month become a digital subscriber at a cost of $15 every four weeks for the cheapest package.

National Public Radio is under fire for an alleged liberal bias.

With issues of economics and ethics at the forefront of journalistic discussions, NewsTrust.com could be an essential tool in solving some of the biggest problems with another important issue: bridging the gap between journalism and journalism consumers.

According to NewsTrust’s website, its aim is to help “people find and share good journalism online, so they can make more informed decisions as citizens.”

Fabrice Florin, executive director of NewsTrust, highlighted at a news literacy conference in 2008 that “the challenge that we all face is trying to address some key problems like information overload, misinformation, mistrust, and civic apathy.”

After signing up for NewsTrust, members have the chance to post and review stories featured on the site. Featured stories are rated by NewsTrust members for accuracy, fairness, sourcing, context, and other principles of journalism. In order to increase the reliability of NewsTrust reviews, both reviewers and individual comments can be rated, in a manner similar to Digg.com.

NewsTrust is a nonprofit organization, and was described by the Poynter Institute for excellence in journalism as one of the tools that is “building the future of news” by helping the public learn news literacy.

Florin described the site as “a social news network, an online community of citizens and journalists that care deeply about journalism, so we can make more informed decisions as citizens.”

RESEARCH

A research project conducted by University of Maryland journalism students Betty Klinck and Tony Herman used NewsTrust’s rating system and comments in order to take a look at how the content and source of a news story influences its’ rating.

The researchers have based their study on the hostile media effect discussed by Gunther and Schmitt in the study titled “Mapping Boundaries of the Hostile Media Effect”, originally researched by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper.

Hostile media effect theory suggests that when news is produced by the mass media, people with strong biases toward an issue tend to believe that the media is biased against their own opinions. The hostile media effect applies to news that has been predetermined as “bias-free”.

Klinck and Herman’s research tested “to see whether people’s opinions about the mass media dissuaded them from giving positive reviews based on the principle of hostile media effect”.

According to Klinck, the research suggests that “readers are capable of detecting good journalistic qualities and can separate quality from bias”.

The research suggested that readers “don’t gauge an article just based on source”, she said.

While these results seem to speak positively for news readers ability to resist bias, Herman states that the results are skewed simple because “if you sign up to review a story [on NewsTrust], you already have the intention of commenting with journalism in mind”. “Newstrust tries to guide you,” added Klinck.

On other news sites, comments may not be linked to your name, potentially causing NewsTrust reviewers to feel more accountable for their review and therefore rate more fairly than they would in other settings.

NewsTrust, in its most noblest goals, aims to discredit the hostile media effect with its group ratings of