“Leading News Outlets Establish Transparency Standards to Help Readers Identify Trustworthy News Sources”

From The Trust Project:

At a time when the public’s trust in news is declining in much of the world, the news industry is launching a new set of transparency standards that help people easily assess the quality and reliability of journalism.
Leading media companies representing dozens of news sites have begun to display Trust Indicators, which provide clarity on the organizations’ ethics and other standards, the journalists’ backgrounds, and how they do their work. These indicators, created by leaders from more than 75 news organizations as part of the nonpartisan Trust Project, also show what type of information people are reading – news, opinion, analysis or advertising.
Each indicator is signaled in the article and site code, providing the first standardized technical language for platforms to learn more from news sites about the quality and expertise behind journalists’ work. Google, Facebook, Bing and Twitter have all agreed to use the indicators and are investigating and piloting ideas about how to best to use them to surface and display quality journalism.
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The eight core indicators are:

• Best Practices: What Are Your Standards? Who funds the news outlet? What is the outlet’s mission? Plus commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections and other standards.
• Author Expertise: Who Reported This? Details about the journalist who wrote the story, including expertise and other stories they have worked on.
• Type of Work: What Is This? Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.
• Citations and References: For investigative or in-depth stories, greater access to the sources behind the facts and assertions.
• Methods:  Also for in-depth stories, information about why reporters chose to pursue a story and how they went about the process.
• Locally Sourced? Lets people know when the story has local origin or expertise.
• Diverse Voices: A newsroom’s efforts to bring in diverse perspectives.
• Actionable Feedback: A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public’s help in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, ensuring accuracy and other areas.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: The Trust Project Brings News Orgs and Tech Giants Together to Tag and Surface High-Quality News (via Nieman Lab)
See Also: Direct to Trust Project Website

Filed under: News, Reports