The first thing you notice about NewsTrust Baltimore, an online aggregator of stories from local news sources, is how friggin’ civil all the commenters are. Consider one reader’s critique of a story about the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to protest at military funerals:
This story does a good job of putting a difficult and emotionally charged story into context and providing the background needed to understand the issues involved in the court case.
Elsewhere in this comment section, NewsTrust readers debate how effective the story’s mixture of AP and local CBS affiliate content is, and consider whether they catch a whiff of bias in the lede. Other stories on the site are similarly dissected, with users sharing even-handed opinions and critiques on articles covering everything from state government hiring practices to “Baltimore’s fledgling food-truck scene.”
Thoughtful, measured critiques probably sound like a dream for readers and writers accustomed to the flame wars fought in many online news comment threads. And though relatively few people used NewsTrust Baltimore during its six-month lifespan, their sobriety of purpose set an example that others would envy.
But the NewsTrust Baltimore experiment raises the question: Is civility sustainable? Unable to get continued foundation support, and not close to being commercially viable, the project finished without hinting at a workable business model. And the relatively small number of articles that sparked robust discussion suggests that there are limits to how deep news consumers want to get in the news-critiquing business.
The project—which was actively curated from February through July of this year and still features new user-updated content—localized the online social networking/media watchdogging tools developed by the national nonprofit NewsTrust. A small staff aggregated each day’s Baltimore news from a variety of legacy and new media—personal blogs like Tomloveland.com to online-only news sites like the Baltimore Brew to the Baltimore Sun, the area’s major daily. Excerpts of those stories appeared on the NewsTrust Baltimore homepage; clicking through led to the story at its original online location framed by NewsTrust’s reviewing tools.
The site’s users took over from there. Readers could give a story one to five points, rating an article on qualities like whether it was factual, well-sourced, well-written, and enterprising. (Disclosure: I was a Baltimore journalist until April. One story of mine was posted to the site. It got a four, based on one review.) Energetic reviewers could go further and write narrative reviews, highlight quotes, and add links. Stories that got positive reviews and ones from news sources already ranked highly could receive more visible placement on the NewsTrust Baltimore site.
Fabrice Florin, NewsTrust’s executive director, says that the reader reviewing process has a dual purpose. “One is to help rate the news based on quality,” he explains. “But that’s really a means to an end and the real purpose is to help each and every one of us who participates in the process become more discriminating as a news reader.”
In order to review a story, readers first have to create a public profile. Reviewing readers then receive their own ranking, which rises or falls based on how active they are, how experienced they consider themselves, and how other readers and NewsTrust staff rate them.
All of these rankings and reviews help maintain the site’s sense of focus and civility—but they can also make the site seem intimidating to a first-time visitor. Mary Hartney, NewsTrust Baltimore’s local editor and a former Baltimore Sun staffer, acknowledges that the reviewing method asks a lot of media-saturated readers.
There’s the element of: ‘I’m already signed up for a lot of social services, do I really want to sign up for another? What am I going to get out of it?’ Fabrice would tell you this: Reviewing a story well on NewsTrust—it takes work, it takes some effort, and I think that can turn some people off, for better or for worse.
This begins to explain the project’s modest success in getting readers to become reviewers. The site received 21,000 unique visitors during its six-month pilot. (By comparison, the Baltimore Sun’s website reported 4.8 million unique visitors for August.) Of those visitors, 535 became members. About 60 percent of these were people who were in some way affiliated with NewsTrust (students in classes collaborating with NewsTrust, media partners, NewsTrust staffers, etc.).
Of the sixty members featured for being active on the site, only about ten weren’t in some way affiliated with the project. One of NewsTrust Baltimore’s unanswered questions is whether participation would have grown if the project was around longer, and, if the numbers swelled, would the civility have survived?
And to some, civility in media criticism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Edward Ericson Jr., a reporter for City Paper, Baltimore’s alt-weekly, wrote pointed reviews on the national and Baltimore NewsTrust sites (e.g. “This is a great idea for a story that doesn’t come through with the goods.”).
He wishes others had gone more negative. “If I was a little disappointed it was because [the reviews] weren’t deep or critical enough,” he says. “I wanted more people like me on the site who would actually take the piss out of something they might be expected to like.” And there’s a fine line between a critical, balanced piss-taking, and a below-the-belt flame war. Is it possible to keep the former from evolving into the latter?
In large part, though, local journos got behind the effort. Many became reviewers. Most local media partnered with the project. Urbanite magazine repurposed NewsTrust comments in its letters section. City Paper gave NewsTrust Baltimore a “Best Media Watchdog Experiment” in its annual “Best of Baltimore” issue.
Fern Shen, editor of the aforementioned Baltimore Brew, says some NewsTrust reviews made the Brew recalibrate its mix of news aggregation and news reporting. “It made me realize that the real contribution from the Brew could be the thing that we have lately really focused on, which is just pure, old-style, sourced, thorough, deep reporting,” Shen says.
But, in the end, media support wasn’t enough to sustain the site’s momentum. The operation shuttered at the end of July, after the $200,000 Open Society Foundations grant that got the project off the ground ran out, and the local foundations Florin approached to keep the project running didn’t bite. (Disclosure: Columbia Journalism Review receives OSF funding.)
Still, the national NewsTrust organization got to do a focused test of its social media widgets, and its work lives on in a few Baltimore-area classrooms that use NewsTrust criteria to teach journalism. The code for the site was open-sourced in August. NewsTrust is refocusing its national efforts on Truthsquad, a fact-checking collaboration with The Center for Public Integrity. And the national NewsTrust site still has regularly updated and deliberated content.
But is there an effective way to localize an effort like NewsTrust, and make it a vibrant, essential part of a city’s conversation about itself? That remains anybody’s guess. Fabrice Florin is the first to acknowledge that half a year doesn’t gain you much traction. “You really need to look at multiple years,” he says. “It was kind of—we were there for six months and suddenly we’re not.”
"Edward Ericson Jr"
Hey, there's a familiar name.
The unfortunate thing about a civil community is that it can manifest in two ways:
1. Agreement turned orthodoxy. The community reinforces itself and becomes less a place absent of uncivil criticism and more a place absent critical thought.
2. Agreement in disagreement. In a community in which civility is prized, conflict avoidance is rife. Topics that might provoke discord are avoided and people scold eachother into respecting the ethos above respecting one's truth. The problem being a place without conflict is a place without passion. It gets real boring and many things worth saying go unsaid.
Cjr has a different problem in that there's no line where boring, repetitive commenting crosses the territory into spam. Incivility? No problem. "you're a commie, you're a commie, you're a commie and reeducatation in concentration camps is your goal" ad nauseum is. There's about as much thought put into that commentary as the person who puts boogers on a bathroom stall.
Pity about the collapse of the enterprise. What was the business model? There's three that I can figure for media and they all involve sponsorship:
A) reader sponsored subscriptions.
B) commercial sponsored advertising.
C) benefactor sponsored commons.
Which of the three, or a mix, did NewsTrust try?
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 4 Nov 2011 at 03:50 PM
Thanks, Thimbles.
For the record, I actually like civility. I'm less impressed by commentary or critique that isn't very thoughtful--whether pro or con--even if it's polite.
Argumentum ad hominem (ad nauseum), of course, is another matter. But I have no idea who you may be referring to. ;)
Your question about the business model is a good one too. I wondered the same thing.
#2 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Fri 4 Nov 2011 at 05:33 PM
Dear Bruce,
Thanks for this thoughtful analysis of our local news pilot in Baltimore!
Your article is factual, well-sourced and fairly presents a variety of perspectives about our experiment. Your insights about strengths and weaknesses of this project are reasonable and provide a helpful overview of this experiment.
To follow up on this fine article, I would like to point your readers to the full project report on our blog:
http://blog.newstrust.net/2011/09/nt-bmore-report.html
We view civility as a virtue, and encourage participants to practice it in their daily lives. But it takes time to appreciate and develop this attitude, as we are constantly influenced by the more basic instincts of human nature.
Edward and Thimbles, we did not set out to develop a business model for this experiment, we mostly wanted to find out if it would add value to local communities. Our report identifies some of the ways in which this service contributes to a more informed citizenry at the local level and we are grateful to OSF for the opportunity to test out these ideas.
The sustainability challenges are much more complex and would have required a more substantial investment to address, as stated in our report. It's an industry-wide issue which we don't claim to have answers for. But we can say with some confidence that this type of service can be effective for engaging citizens to learn about and discuss local issues, develop their news literacy skills and bring their communities together. We hope to see more services like these in the future.
Thanks again for these good observations about our experiment!
Best regards,
Fabrice Florin
Executive Director, NewsTrust
#3 Posted by Fabrice Florin, CJR on Fri 4 Nov 2011 at 07:13 PM
"But I have no idea who you may be referring to. ;)"
Somethings are better left mysterious. ;)
"we mostly wanted to find out if it would add value to local communities."
That may have had potential under a benefactor model in which an enterprise provides a benefit to an organization / group of organizations that it becomes worth sponsoring apart from subscriptions or ads. ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity manage this through partnerships with traditional ad based media who distribute their work. OpenDNS is another service that exists out of the benefits it provides the community which the rich members don't mind paying for.
Without that though, you have to find a way to scrounge ad or subscription revenue. The whole "go public and we'll be millionaires" model in the nineties fell apart because the many ventures didn't put any thought into where the revenue was supposed to come from.
It's good that your service had a goal, it's good that it provided value, but "show me the revenue!" otherwise, no matter how noble, it's dead when the investment capital runs out.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 4 Nov 2011 at 09:22 PM