The Trust Project: new hope for trustworthy news

The Trust Project along with the Jeff Jarvis enhancement offers hope to revive trustworthy journalism as “the immune system of democracy.”

The gist of this effort is to develop signals of trust for news outlets and individual articles. For example, a news outlet would commit to a serious code of ethics/trust and also diversity, and some means wherein the news outlet could be held accountable to that code.

The ethics code work of the Society of Professional Journalists and that of the Online News Association are really good places to start.

So, the gist of the Trust Project is that:

1. A news outlet promises to adhere to trustworthy practices, indicating that via standard signals in publication.

2. Articles from that outlet could be ranked higher, in places like Google News, than article from sources that don’t promise trustworthiness.

This is NOT about any news aggregator picking and choosing what’s trustworthy; making such a claim would itself be untrustworthy.

Sure, the devil’s in the details, particularly when it comes to holding a news outlet accountable to its code.

Sure, there’ll be other issues, but far as I can tell, this is the only hope of restoring “the immune system of democracy.”