Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
"For consumers of news and searchers of information, these are heady times," writes Steve Outing. "Most of us are adding new news sources to our information diet all the time." However, "there's a huge downside to this abundance: How as consumers do we know if we can trust what we read? How do we know if it's balanced, or serving someone's narrow agenda?" One new option is NewsTrust, "a social network model which uses the intellect of the masses to rate all manner of news content and news sources. ... In beta now and due out in early 2008, Newstrust will not only be a stand-alone site where consumers can come to find the best journalism as ranked by an army of volunteer media reviewers, but more importantly it will (we can hope) be deployed over all manner of online news sources so that readers will on any news-related website see an objective rating of that site's quality and of specific news content."