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| The Huffington Post's OffTheBus Partners With NewsTrust To Evaluate Coverage of the Presidential Campaign | ||
| Partnership's First Project will be a "News Hunt" for the Best Reporting on Presidential Candidate John McCain | ||
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| New York, NY, June 2 -- The Huffington Post's OffTheBus, a citizen-powered online news organization, is partnering with NewsTrust, a nonprofit social news site promoting quality journalism, to analyze media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. For this first joint project, the partners will evaluate the quality of recent news coverage of Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The John McCain "news hunt" will be the first step in uncovering campaign stories that have been overlooked or inadequately reported by the media. NewsTrust will provide OffTheBus (OTB) editors and members with an updated feed of McCain news and opinion, rated using NewsTrust's state-of-the-art news literacy tools, as well as its growing network of experienced journalists, citizen reviewers, digital media innovators and community organizers.
The John McCain "news hunt" will engage citizen reviewers from OTB and NewsTrust and will run from today, June 2nd, through Sunday, June 8th. Using NewsTrust review tools, members of both organizations will analyze hundreds of news articles and opinions about the candidate. Once completed, results of the survey will be published on both sites. The findings will point to areas of coverage of Sen. McCain that have been lacking, and to which OTB can then devote resources. The project was prompted by media criticism suggesting that the candidate may have benefited by relatively lax coverage of his campaign because of the extraordinary attention received by his Democratic rivals, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, in their hotly contested primary battle. "The Huffington Post's OffTheBus is delighted to partner with NewsTrust to strengthen its innovative citizen journalist-driven coverage of the presidential campaign," said Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Huffington Post, which produces OTB in conjunction with New York University and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net. "With its smart team of journalism and technology experts and its unique news rating feeds, NewsTrust is an ideal collaborator for OffTheBus, as it continues to empower citizens to make important contributions to campaign coverage. We're especially excited about the partnership's first project: a clear-eyed look at coverage of John McCain." "NewsTrust is thrilled to work with the talented team at Huffington Post's OffTheBus," said Fabrice Florin, executive director and founder of NewsTrust.net. "NewsTrust makes it easy for anyone to rate the news based on quality, not just popularity -- by evaluating each article's fairness, sourcing, context and other core principles of good journalism. This focus on quality information and news literacy can help us all make more informed decisions as citizens, as well as re-build the trust that has been lost between the news media and the public." The collaboration between OTB and NewsTrust is aimed at fostering high-quality news coverage and helping thousands of civic-minded news consumers to find quality journalism and become more discriminating news consumers. The success of the partnership depends in large part on OTB's talented pool of on-the-ground citizen reporters and cutting-edge reporting techniques, and NewsTrust's unique review tools and select community of journalists and citizen reviewers. About Huffington Post's OffTheBus: A collaboration between The Huffington Post and NYU and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net, OffTheBus is designed to be an editorial engine for an alternative form of campaign journalism, the strength of which is the is the people who volunteer to be involved in producing for it. OffTheBus combines the people-number organizing advantages of the web -- the falling costs for widely-disseminated people to share information and collaborate -- with the web's strength as a flexible, multi-media publishing platform. About NewsTrust.net: NewsTrust.net helps people find and share good journalism online. This nonprofit, nonpartisan organization is committed to helping citizens make more informed decisions about their lives and governments. Their free website (www.newstrust.net) offers an integrated online service, which includes a quality information filter, news literacy tools and a civic engagement network. They publish a daily feed of quality news and opinions from trusted mainstream and independent sources, based on ratings from their reviewers, weighted by expertise. Their web review tools enable the public to evaluate fairness, evidence, sourcing and other core journalistic principles -- and become more discriminating news consumers in the process. NewsTrust's Executive Director is Fabrice Florin, a former journalist and a digital media pioneer at Apple and Macromedia. Its advisors include Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, Howard Rheingold and other digital media innovators from organizations like Craigslist, Google, the Poynter Institute, and Stanford University. Founded in 2005 and based in Mill Valley, California, NewsTrust.net is funded through grants and private donations, and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Ayrshire Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Google Inc., Mitch Kapor and other private donors. More information is available at www.newstrust.net. About The Huffington Post The Huffington Post is a news and opinion website which in three years has become an influential media brand -- "The Internet Newspaper." The site offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living and green, and is a top destination for news, blogs and original content. The Huffington Post ("HuffPost") has over 10 million unique users each month and is the most-linked-to blog on the Internet, per Technorati. HuffPost has an active community, with over 500,000 comments made on the site each month. The Huffington Post has 1,500+ influential bloggers -- from celebrities and politicians to academics and policy experts -- who contribute in real-time on a wide-range of topics making news today, including: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Wesley Clark, Nora Ephron, Ari Emanuel, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Bill Maher, Nancy Pelosi, Margaret Cho and Alec Baldwin. A comprehensive list of the contributors to The Huffington Post can be found in its bloggers index: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/index/. Contact for Huffington Post: Mario Ruiz VP, Media Relations The Huffington Post 917-864-5370 Contact for NewsTrust: Fabrice Florin Executive Director NewsTrust.net 415-388-6688 ### Press Kit: To find out more about NewsTrust.net, check our online press kit. |
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