NewsTrust

NewsTrust.net claims to be "your guide to good journalism," but according to whom?

The site is free to join and allows members to read, review and submit news stories they'd like to share with the community. The stories are rated on what are deemed to be important standards, such as fairness, evidence, sourcing and context.

You can choose to limit your review categories to the most important factors, or expanded it to dozens of questions. Apart from rating the article itself, reviewers rate their trust in the publication, which I find to be a particularly useful feature that can help expose users to news sites and organizations.

I like the idea of a community of readers gathering interesting news stories and trying to rate them on their journalistic quality, but everyone's opinion of good journalism is different. Readers have different standards and interests, and I'd be more likely to read something that was rated favorably by someone who I believe has standards similar to mine.

The site is set up to also rate members, so that any biases in their reviews would make their reviews valued less.

There are other features of the site that separate it from many other news aggregators. NewsTrust allows you to sort through stories on different subjects, based on their reviews, or how recently they've been reviewed or added. There is also a featured topic prominently displayed on the site with related stories compiled by NewsTrust.

Without knowing your community it's tough to say you would trust their judgment of what is important and well done, but I think the idea of a site where news is ranked based on journalism rather than popularity is a positive step in legitimizing news content on the Web.