NewsTrust is a N2Y2 Featured Project that was created as a free online social news network to help people find and share good journalism. Three years later, NewsTrust is still helping people make more informed decisions through journalism and offers an integrated online service which includes a news filter, media literacy tools and a civic engagement network.

Recently, NewsTrust has been expanding its platform and over the next six months plans to run pilot programs for use of the following tools:

"NewsTrust's more thoughtful approach can yield dramatically different top stories. On Tuesday, NewsTrust's users selected "Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006," from a blog written by Juan Cole, president of the Global Americana Institute. Digg's top story was "50 Reasons -- why it's great to be a Guy!!" from a blog written by someone named Mike in Los Angeles." - San Jose Mercury News - Elise Ackerman

"The site is looking to judge news articles online by quality, rather than simple popularity, with a more finely grained evaluation of news stories than one gets from the gladiatorial thumbs-up, thumbs-down votes by which stories live and die on Digg. (...) NewsTrust, in essence, aims to counter the fascination of the inclusive crowd -- picture Britney Spears on a Linux-based

Location

I stumbled upon what I think is a brilliant use of Flickr. Fabrice Florin, who now leads NewsTrust, took these pictures of people who attended Burning Man 2006. They each held up a board on which they wrote their wishes for the future. I’m going to pinch this idea for our next Idealist.org Silicon Valley event. I think it’s a neat way to keep a snapshot of each member’s mug and dreams.

I found Britt's interview with Rosalyn Lemieux to be truly informative, and so submitted it to NewsTrust. If y’all could go over there and rate the story, I think it will be good for Britt & Netsquared. (I don’t work for Net2 or anything, but this community’s been very good to me – and Britt’s extraordinary – so if there’s anything we can do to raise their profiles, I think we should try to help). Never heard of NewsTrust? I posted about it here.

If you’re a news junkie, and you haven’t tried NewsTrust, don’t. It’s addictive and should be banned. But if I can’t stop you, there a few things you should know: (1) it’s a news rating service, (2) it allows ordinary people to judge the quality of sources and stories, (3) it provides structure within which to make such judgments, so you don’t have to make stuff up, (4) the process reveals a lot about what good journalism is and isn't, (5) it will tell you things you did not know about yourself, (6) if you’re already suffering from too much information, you can read just the highly-rated stories, or just those which were given high ratings by raters you trust, (7) it’s a community of some pretty smart people who care about the truth, (8) it’s run and backed by some very very good people, (9) I’m the volunteer host for its National Public Radio section, so am completely biased and not credible (if you want to draw more attention to an outlet that you trust, you too can sign up to be its host). If after all this you still click this link and get hooked, don’t say I didn’t warn you.