NewsTrust - News Literacy - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

How the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Justin Ellis - May. 13 (News Report) - Howard Rheingold isn’t too concerned about whether Google is making us stupid or if Facebook is making us lonely. Those kind of criticisms, Rheingold says, miscalculate the ability humans have to change their behavior, particularly when it comes to how we use social media and the Internet more broadly. “If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool,” Rheingold said Thursday. Rheingold was visiting the MIT Media Lab to talk about his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which examines how people can use the Internet not just to better themselves, but also society as a whole. Rheingold has a longer online history than most, going back to The WELL, one of the first online forums back in the 1980s. Ever since writing about that experience, Rheingold has developed a habit for dropping the kind of book that not just probes what it means to be online, but charts what that means for all of us.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - May. 13 (News Report) - In an interview about the future of the media industry, Google's head of news products Richard Gingras said that newspapers are like old-fashioned internet portals such as AOL and Yahoo, and that unless they can adapt to the web instead of fighting it they are doomed.

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NewsTrust Baltimore takes a local approach to media literacy and showcasing new journalism

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Nieman Journalism Lab - By Justin Ellis - Feb. 09 (News Analysis) - NewsTrust sees its mission as helping readers find “good journalism” by giving people the tools to separate good from bad. But when it comes to journalism, good and bad aren’t exactly universal truths anymore. Is a story good if it adheres to facts but lacks strong writing? Is a story bad if it’s on a blog, regardless of how it’s reported? And what if its told through an ideological or political lens different from your own? While NewsTrust has previously employed its tools for vetting journalism on a national level, their newest test, NewsTrust Baltimore, takes things to a smaller scale — namely one where readers’ connection to news is based on geography (will a new school be built? is the police department cutting staff? did the legislature cut taxes?) and necessity. That familiarity, with both the news and outlets reporting it, could make for a better experiment in media criticism as well as media literacy. Who better to judge the Baltimore Sun or WYPR than the people who live in the area?

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 5 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Truthsquad Shows Potential of Crowdsourced Fact-Checking

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - Aug. 12 (News Report) - Florin said that the impulse behind both NewsTrust and Truthsquad was the idea that “if we are to become our own editors in the digital age, we need better tools and training to thoughtfully evaluate the credibility of the information we find online.”

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Well Known: Twitter; Little Known: John Roberts

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Pew Research Center - Jul. 17 (Poll) - An overwhelming proportion of Americans are familiar with Twitter, the online information-sharing network. Perhaps more surprisingly, a large majority also knows that children who are born to illegal immigrants in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens. Yet the public continues to struggle in identifying political figures, foreign leaders and even knowing facts about key government policies. Only about a third of Americans (34%) know that the government’s bailout of banks and financial institutions was enacted under the Bush administration. Nearly half (47%) incorrectly say that the Troubled Asset Relief Program – widely known as TARP – was signed into law by President Obama.

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Want to Read Good Journalism? Try NewsTrust's New Personalized Filtering Tool

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 17 (News Report) - Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average - 8 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Bad News

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Mar. 15 (Other) - They went looking for crap, and by golly they found plenty of it. Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism. The students, along with other NewsTrust users, spent...

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