News Transparency looks to hold journos accountable

A brand new website has launched with the aim of providing people with information about the journalists behind the bylines.

News Transparency operates off a Wikipedia-type model and is the brainchild of Ira Stoll.

Stoll is the founder of another website called FutureOfCapitalism.com and a former managing editor of the now defunct New York Sun.

In a statement on the site’s front page, News Transparency said that its aim is to help “you find out more about the people who produce the news,” and allow “you to hold them accountable, the same way that journalists hold other institutions accountable, by posting reviews and sharing information.”

The site features an alphabetical list of hundreds of journalists and, like Wikipedia, invites users to edit the profiles of those featured on the site.

The journalist profiles include basic information such as age, education, current employer and work history.

Also included are links to a journalist’s social media accounts, articles written about them, their political party affiliation, their charitable donations and their “professional” and “personal” networks.

This analogy is, however, imperfect as the site has features borrowed from a number of other sites.

According to News Transparency it is also like:

• Amazon.com and other similar retail sites, in that community members can post reviews they write themselves, along with ratings on a five-star scale.
• Facebook and Twitter, in that you can share the comments or reviews you post with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.
• Google, in that it’s driven by a search box you type into that leads to information about the subject of the search.

“Today, polls show public distrust of the media at a record level, and academic research shows that roughly half of newspaper stories contain errors,” News Transparency said.

“This site aims to improve the accuracy, quality, and transparency of journalism by making it easier to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas,” it said.

“That information should help readers, viewers, and listeners put what they are reading in better context, and it may even prompt some improvements by the journalists,” it added.

The factual errors which the site is concerned with abound even in well covered, large-event stories.

A recent study by the Dubai School of Government, for instance, found that journalists were over-reliant on unverified sources of information during Arab Spring uprisings.

The site’s creators say, though, that they do not want there to only be criticism of journalists on the site. Their hope is that there is also “lots of praise of excellent journalism”.