Earlier this month a new type of socially driven news site launched. NewsTrust (covered here by NewAssignment.Net), lets users judge a story on journalistic merit — not mere popularity. The endeavor is lead by former journalist Fabrice Florin.

NewAssignment.Net caught up with Florin to learn more about this leap in social news, where the ethics and standards of journalism as a profession can be analyzed and scrutinized by the wisdom of the crowd.

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Q: What kind of funding do you have, and how do you plan on monetizing your project? I see you accept donations, is that the only method (a-la Wikipedia)?

Florin: Our biggest restriction right now is funding. I have personally funded this out of my pocket, with a small grant, and one donor. We are severely underfunded and so are going very slowly.

We see three sources of revenue for NewsTrust over time.

The first is what you are seeing right now, which is the donations. This will eventually become a membership, where you will get some premium services that the other users won’t get.
The second avenue is going to be online advertising, once we get enough traffic. There is no point in putting (up) the ads now when there isn’t enough traffic to justify them. I am expecting to roll out the ads in three to six months.
The third is doing b-to-b (business to business) service for large portals and media companies that are interested in building trust with their audience. There are a number of services that we can offer, including a ‘rating’ link, or offering discussions that are moderated, but most importantly, giving them an independent source of feedback about their work, independent research about their users, and recommendations on how to improve their services.

I can’t say with certainty what the specific services will be until we have built relationships with the companies, but we want to help them build trust with their readers and their viewers and there are a number of ways in which we can do that.

Q: As someone who is familiar with journalistic principles what do you think about the quality of the material published in the blogosphere today? How do blogs rate in terms of factual integrity? Do you see a trend toward bloggers acting within journalistic principles of fact checking and publishing derogatory information? Or does muckraking seem to be the order of the day?

Florin: It varies widely. There are some bloggers that are doing outstanding journalism, and on the other hand, you have all the personal diaries which don’t really add any value to the public discourse. And in the middle you have all these opinions and commentaries about mainstream media, which constitutes the bulk of your news-oriented blogs.

As far as fact checking is concerned, the blogosphere is really like the wild wild west. Some discipline is starting to show up. There are people like Dan Gilmore of Center for Citizen Media, which is a good example of an organization that really wants to instill some principles and wants to help provide the tools and the methodology.

What’s tricky, is that a lot of bloggers just want to be conversationalists. And so they feel that they don’t have to follow journalistic tenets. Yet they are being perceived by the reader as part as of the news industry (or news sector). And so therefore they should be governed in some part, by the same governing principles that make for quality journalism.

So even though you are not a journalist, (as a blogger) you are still a citizen, and therefore governed by a code of behavior. It’s fine if you don’t want to be a journalist, but still try to be fair, try to be factual, try to take into account viewpoints other than your own, and present them in a reasonable way. And your argument will ultimately be stronger.

Is the NewsTrust philosophy in favor of a blogging code of ethics and do you feel that it would contribute to more complete, unbiased, and reliable content?

Florin: Absolutely. However, this certainly ought to be a voluntary code rather than a legislated one. It is to the sector’s advantage to put together a voluntary code of ethics.

On the other hand, you have some professional journalists, that are reaching a very wide audience, who cross the line daily. And this is not healthy, because people on the other end tend to believe what they see on television and what they read in the papers. They tend to think it is true. And if it is not true, something needs to be done about that. NewsTrust is going to try and do something about that, and it has a methodology of identifying these breaches.

Why does socially driven media fail to regulate inaccuracy and bias? If we are to believe in the wisdom of the crowds, then a site like Digg, with its army of 600,000 users, should be able to create a truly wise community which would only promote the best content, no?

Florin: There is one simple reason. Digg has no discipline. It has no code of ethics, or a very minor code of ethics, to flag a story that appears to be inaccurate. But they don’t have discipline. They only ask one question. “Do you like this story?” So they’re measuring popularity, they’re not measuring quality.

There is no rigor in Digg. Digg is a game. It is entertainment, where people go in, and part of the game is to put in things that you like and hope that they make it to the top, and then your name gets associated with it. I have been in the industry for a while, and I can recognize a game when I see one. Digg has everything, it has the scoring (ranking) and the fun payoffs. It is first and foremost an entertainment experience.

As a secondary outcome, it provides a valuable service. Because it gets citizens engaged, and it does provide a filter, based on popularity. And popularity does have some value. It is one of the data points that you can look at. But it is not sufficient by itself. Popularity is not the same as quality, and by measuring popularity, you are some ways deceiving the public, by giving the impression that those are good quality pieces. But they are not, they are just popular pieces. There is a big difference.

Q: Are there any hurdles that you have had to face and overcome?

Florin: We have two challenges. The first one is to get enough people to participate in process of carefully reviewing, and making our service easier to use, friendlier, and so more people would want to use it and make it part of their routine. The second challenge is potential gaming. In other words, groups of users, working with each other to affect certain kinds of stories that reflect their viewpoints. And we have mechanisms in place to protect against that.

Parting advice: Go beyond popularity. Please, we will show you how to do it. If they want to use NewsTrust on Digg, we will work with them. It’s not us versus them. There is value in the mob, but the mob needs to have principles. They need to be disciplined before they can really lead to intelligent choices.

Muhammad Saleem is a Netscape Navigator and writes on his own blog The Mu Life where he studies the social bookmarking phenomenon.