Thanks for including NewsTrust in your arguments about online credibility.
(Disclosure: I am NewsTrust’s Executive Director)

As much as we appreciate the coverage, I would encourage you to take a closer look at what’s actually going on at NewsTrust before calling our methodology ‘fundamentally flawed.’

May I suggest that we spend some time on the phone next week, so I could give you an update on our service? It’s been a couple years since you originally checked the site and last reviewed on NewsTrust, and we have made some significant progress since, that addresses many of your concerns.

For example, our stated nonprofit mission at NewsTrust is to ‘help people find good journalism online.’ I think we do a pretty good job of it, if you’ll compare our feeds to other aggregators. Not only that, but we also help citizens develop their own news literacy skills and become more discriminating news consumers in the process. Those are all essential ingredients in building a culture of trust, based on facts and core principles of journalism, not just opinion or popularity.

We also go to great lengths to track the reputation of our own reviewers, both through member ratings and staff validation, with criteria ranging from expertise to transparency and fairness. We then weigh each reviewer’s ratings on our site based on their overall member level, which gives our most trusted members more influence on the final ratings.

So while we don’t claim to have all the answers, we are demonstrating clear progress with a reasonable and practical solution that deserves a bit more careful attention than you were able to devote above. As a result, this blog post seems rather superficial and largely based on the author’s speculations — with no factual evidence, authoritative sources or independent perspectives to back up its arguments. Who’s calling the kettle black?

I can understand your concern about the risk of oversimplifying our quantitative evaluations of this qualitative process, but I encourage you to take a closer look at the merits of the hybrid approach we practice, which combines the wisdom of the ‘vetted’ crowd with that of a few good editors and some pretty sophisticated computer algorithms. The resulting news filter we’ve evolved through this three-way interaction is much more nuanced than the ‘binary’ adjective implies.

As a society, we need new ways to sift through the ‘information tsunami’ that hits us every day to find quality news we can trust. But solutions that rely only on computer-assisted filtering, like DayLife or Google News (both of whom we have the highest respect for), fall short at some point, because we haven’t yet figured out how to teach computers the difference between good journalism and misinformation. And other solutions that solely rely on thumbs-up/thumbs-down popularity contests like Digg or Reddit, also fall short because of their lack of discipline and shared values.

So we think that a combination of professionals, amateurs and computers, guided by core principles of journalism and a nuanced rating system, offers the best of all these worlds. A conversational approach to sifting through the news is wonderful, but how’s a computer supposed to make sense of all these words? Computers like numbers and binary data, so inevitably, all these qualitative judgments will have to be converted into numbers before we can properly sort them out.

You can find out more about NewsTrust on our site and on our blog — and if you’d interested in a full overview, check the video of our presentation at Google a couple weeks ago: http://blog.newstrust.net/2008/05/newstrust-at-th.html

Meanwhile, I look forward to comparing notes with our friends at NewsCred to see how we can help each other address these important challenges. And we’re already working with DayLife to add value to our service by combining some of their meta-data with ours. Ultimately, I believe the scope of this problem will require an alliance of compatible and thoughtful initiatives working closely together to bring about a solution that works for the public.

We’re only three weeks into our alpha, so we treasure good feedback. While we are more optimistic about the ability of our community to determine quality journalism, we’ll certainly take all your comments into mind as we set sail on what is surely a long, difficult but ultimately rewarding journey. Let’s keep in touch!

Shafqat (cofounder of NewsCred)

” A lot of years thinking about it. The format of journalism is that you quote someone on one side, and then you quote someone on the other, and you have to pick experts. And the theory being that if you get two people who, as we found out in The Experts Speak, two experts who are wrong, that somehow you’re gonna get the truth out of that. In the case of why did The Times hire Bill Kristol, however, there’s a case where I think that it’s a principle of the op-ed page. If you have people on one side — Bob Herbert or someone like that — and he happens to be right, you need someone who happens to be wrong on the other side. So, it’s — that’s one of the principles of balance that happens in the news business. And–”

Truth now gets “balanced” by lies.