I see NewsTrust as an important tool for citizen journalism and I wonder why it does not get around more. It gives ordinary people the possibility of applying their own criterion regarding which news or stories should be relevant to the public opinion and explain why by rating the story and commenting it.
I enjoyed the entire process that the site proposes: looking for news which I considered interesting and submitting them to the site. It is clear and easy to do it, and I believe anyone should be able to go through it without any inconvenient. The only problem is expecting to get a feedback by getting people to review it. That seems to be a challenge for the site, since most of the stories receive only two or three reviews. I believe there should be some kind of encouragement that motivates people enough to take the time to do the reviews. Maybe some kind of contest, for instance: people get awarded for giving the best review of the week.
Regarding the rating system, I believe the rate scale should be modified somehow, since even though people provide total different scores and comments, the overall rating is very similar for most stories. They should also work on making clearer to reviewers what the difference between comments and notes are.
I like the fact that they don’t limit the sources to mainstream or independent media, they have diverse types of sources and they make it clear where the information is coming from. And the fact that most people interacting in the site are people with some kind of journalistic interest, makes most of the news somehow appealing. This also provides the site an aspect of social network, where one can find people with similar interests.
Finally I would recommend NewsTrust as a trustable news source but I believe it is fundamental that more people participate actively by submitting news and reviews, to make it a more reliable tool.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment