News: To Trust or Not to Tust?

Today, we had a guest speaker in class named Kaizar Campwala who is the current associate editor at Newstrust. Not only was his presentation interesting and insightful, it was also very encouraging. Essentially, Newstrust is a non-profit social news network that screens and checks up on articles and seeks to promote quality journalism. While as you would imagine this site offers its viewers quality news, however, it also includes information credibility filters, news literacy tools, as well as a whole civic engagement network.
In his presentation, Campwala discussed all the different cause-effect and problem-solution issues with today's media and news coverage. It was interesting to see how he laid out each major issue and how you can solve each one. For someone like me, who is weary not only of the legitimacy of news blogs but also mainstream news coverage like that of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc. it's really comforting to me to know that there are people out there who still hold the core values of journalism to the highest of standards. It's about time news became rated based on quality and not popularity.
According to Campwala, there are 22 editors on Newstrust. Some of these are regular citizens while other range from doctors, bankers, librarians, or just people passionate about effective and accurate journalism. Its nice to see that there are only 3 practicing journalists who are editors for the site. Its a breath of fresh air knowing that other people can also identify what is good and bad news. With sites like this, there is no reason why people cannot be fully knowledgable about what is REALLY going on in the world. I think now what we need be concerned about is those who are too stuck in their opinions and ways of thinking that they ignore the facts put in front of them and refuse to accept that some of their "trusted news sources" actually give them poor information. With newstrust on the prowl, ridding the proverbial internet "streets" of malinformation, I think our next issue to tackle is a much more complex beast: Ignorance.