Next steps for NewsTrust Baltimore

Our six-month pilot for NewsTrust Baltimore ends on July 31, and we would like to give you an update of our next steps as wind down this local news experiment.

For the next few weeks, we will continue to publish a series of reports about what we accomplished together during this pilot and what we learned along the way. We will also transition from a staffed website to an automated service with community input. Here's what else will change in coming days.

At the end of this week, on Friday, July 15, we will discontinue our daily email newsletters for NewsTrust Baltimore. The home page of our website will promote our recent reports, along with a daily featured news story. We will still provide news listings below the fold on our home page, as well as on other pages on our site, and NewsTrust Baltimore members will be able to post and review stories on these pages. But these listings will only be curated by our staff on a daily basis until July 31, when our pilot ends.

To prepare for this transition, our last daily email newsletter will go out this Friday. We will continue to offer our weekly newsletters until Wednesday, July 27, highlighting some of the most trusted news stories of the week. If you now subscribe to our daily newsletter, you will automatically receive these weekly newsletters every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern time, through the end of the month. After July 27, we will no longer send any newsletters, since we cannot guarantee their quality without staff curation.  

If getting daily emails from us is important to you, you are welcome to subscribe to our daily MyNews email on our national site, which provides a personalized listing of news stories based on your interests every morning at 6 a.m. Eastern time. This automated service is available free to all NewsTrust members, and it only takes a minute to set up on your MyNews page (if you're not yet a member, read more about MyNews here). To get stories about Baltimore on your MyNews email, simply add Baltimore as a topic, or add Baltimore sources you want to follow in the right sidebar. Of course, you can change any of your email subscriptions at any time, on your Email Newsletters page.

We will also make a few more changes in coming weeks, to make sure that our crowdsourced news listings serve the best interests of our community. For example, stories that have been rated highly by trusted members will be featured more prominently. And NewsTrust members will only be able to post up to five stories per day, to prevent any individual from flooding the site with content that others may not find as useful. If you have any feedback or questions about any of these changes, please contact us at feedback-at-newstrust.net.

 

A new direction for NewsTrust

The end of our Baltimore pilot coincides with some major changes we are making at NewsTrust, as outlined in today's blog post on our national site. At the the recent meeting of our board of directors on June 17, we decided to pivot our nonprofit organization from a standalone news-curation site to a consultancy that will serve the needs of larger partners and help their communities become better informed about important public issues.

Our initial focus will be on fact-checking services, to expose misinformation in the public debate. To that end, we have partnered with the Center for Public Integrity and Craig Newmark to develop Truthsquad.com for the 2012 U.S. elections. We created this pro-am fact-checking service last year to help citizens and journalists work together to separate fact from fiction. 

News sharing on the web is now primarily taking place on large social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, reducing the need for curated news sites like NewsTrust.net and NewsTrust Baltimore. As a result, our site traffic has decreased in recent months and we no longer have funding to pay for our daily news curation service, which we offered for the past five years on the national site, with support from foundations and private donors.

Instead, we see an emerging need for quality fact-checking services and collaborative evaluation tools, which we think can effectively provide by extending our innovative platform to serve partner communities on their sites. We will also explore partnerships that enable us to provide news-literacy and civic-engagement services through consumer and educational channels.

This new strategy supports our overall mission to help people find good journalism and credible information online, but it does so more effectively, by shifting our focus to services that can be sustained over time, in collaboration with our partners.

In the meantime, we're deeply grateful for all that you and other community members have done to support NewsTrust Baltimore this year.

Stay tuned for more reports in coming days about what we learned together as a community.

 

Fabrice Florin
Executive Director and Founder
NewsTrust Communications