Trusting the News

With journalists and bloggers running rampant on the Internet these days it has become overwhelmingly difficult to find decent journalism. This is why Newstrust.net has set up an Internet phenomenon that allows it's users to rate the journalistic quality of every news story that they read.

It is quite easy for a news-guru to become a Newstrust member and then to rate and review any stories on the site at their discretion. 

In this story from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, the reporter detailed Obama's economic plans for when he takes office in January. Despite good sources and an interesting read I thought that the reporter made a mistake by using an anonymous source for the best quotes in the story, in my opinion the reporter should have identified the source or kept it out of the story, it just smells fishy to me.  

The next story I reviewed was an AP synopsis of a report released by the International Monetary Fund on the soaring inflation in the world. The article looked like a press release and in my review I talked about the lack of reporting that went into this piece. Really, the journalist only used one report to write her entire story. 

The last story I reviewed was my favorite of the three. It was a Yahoo! News story about how South Korean agriculture companies had purchased a massive amount of land in Madagascar, their purpose to produce a greater surplus of grains for a country that has little land left to farm on (South Korea). The article was refreshing,  it was about something I had never heard of before and the reporter did a great job of getting enough sources to give the full spectrum of the story. My overall rating for this was the highest of the three, a sturdy 4.4. 

Thank you Newstrust, now you've allowed me to become a potentially legitimate news critic with just the click of a button, my ego is inflating like a balloon.