NewsTrust

NewsTrust.net is an interesting site designed to present and filter news from many different sites. The concept of this site is actually quite interesting--to vote on a story you have to register and then the weight your vote recieves depends on how much information you provide about yourself and how active you are on the site. The goal of this is to restrict the voting to only those with some kind of journalistic experience or relevant knowledge. What this eventually provides is a site full of well-written, well-researched and relevant articles.

Now my problem with this site. I had no idea that the votes were weighted and that it was meant for only journalist-types to vote. After class, I was quite impressed with the site. The concept is great, and it will provide a much better collection of stories than news aggregation sites that are specifically machine-run or voted on for popularity. However, before class I thought it was just another site that collected stories from other sources. Thinking that maybe it was just me, I sent the site to other people who were unrelated to class and they said the same thing, "Ok, it's another site that collects news stories." Besides the tagline "Your Guide to Good Journalism," I think there needs to be something much more obvious to explain what is going on.

I tend to think that the downfalls of sites like these is that they are designed by journalists...who expect other journalists or people who think just like journalists to read them. In reality, most readers are lazy, and they're not going to want to hunt through an extensive "About us" section to figure out the basic point of the site. At the moment, the site really only feels accessible to knowledgable journalistic readers, which is great when it comes to the voting. But if they eventually want the readers of the site to be of much broader demographics, they might want to think about the presentation of the concept of the site.