NewsTrust’s home page. Click here to visit the site.

NewsTrust helps people find and share good journalism online, so they can make more informed decisions as citizens.

As a nonprofit organization, NewsTrust promotes good journalism, media literacy and civic engagement. Their social news site provides quality news feeds and collaborative tools to a growing community of news consumers, journalists, educators and students.

NewsTrust.net features a daily feed of quality news and opinions from mainstream and independent sources, based on ratings from their reviewers. Their web review tools enable the public to evaluate facts, fairness, context and other core journalistic principles — and help people become more discriminating news consumers in the process. For a quick tour of NewsTrust, watch their video:

NewsTrust hosts regular News Hunts to get citizens better informed about important public issues, a service that is particularly effective in schools. They also offer a range of practical online tools, such as Truthsquad, a community fact-checking service — and MyNews, a personal filter that lets people find news that matters to them.

“NewsTrust brings citizens and professionals together to evaluate news quality,” said Fabrice Florin, the nonprofit site’s founder and executive director. “With so much misinformation spreading on the Internet, we see a growing need for tools to help people tell apart fact from fiction and curate their own news feeds, as a community.”

Unlike other social news sites, NewsTrust.net features news and opinions rated by its members based on quality — not just popularity. NewsTrust.net tracks quality ratings and reputation for each news publication under review, to help identify trustworthy sources. The service also ensures the reliability of its evaluations by rating its own reviewers and validating their expertise.

The Ayrshire Foundation gave NewsTrust a $20,000 grant in April 2010, to organize a high school pilot and help students learn to tell apart good journalism from misinformation.

In the spring of 2010, NewsTrust worked with five high school teachers and 120 students in two different pilot sites: the International High School in San Francisco and the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. For two weeks, the students looked for good and bad journalism about the global economy, from a wide range of international and U.S. news sources. Students were invited to rate news stories online, by evaluating their accuracy, fairness and other qualities. For early results of this experiment, read the full report on the NewsTrust blog and check the pilot photos.

The pilot enabled NewsTrust to test and refine its educational programs and adapt its web platform to help high school students evaluate news quality more effectively. Based on feedback from pilot participants, NewsTrust also developed new teacher guides and group pages for use by high schools. According to teachers surveyed about this project, this pilot was successful in helping the next generation of news consumers become more discerning about what they hear in the news — and more engaged as citizens.

Ayrshire board member Terry Gamble wrote this testimonial about why they supported NewsTrust:

“Newstrust addresses in a nonpartisan way the dearth of thoughtful discourse in this country by presenting a model of ‘citizen journalism’ that can be easily accessed, utilized and scaled up by its participants in the way that Amazon, eBay and Craigslist have been. As a parent and a citizen of this country, I am longing for ways to educate our children and each other to discern fact from fiction, truth from ‘truthiness.’”

The Ayrshire Foundation is delighted that NewsTrust has received major support from the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network and Ashoka to help bring its social news service to a broader community.

To find out more about NewsTrust, visit their site.