Implementing the Trust Protocol

6 min readNov 22, 2017

Image Credit https://thetrustproject.org/

In the rising tide of “fake news” and overall decline of trust in media organizations, the Trust Project emerged as an effort to build transparency and confidence in quality journalism. Beginning with user studies and interviews, the Trust Project sought to understand what helps readers evaluate the trustworthiness of a story. These insights were brought to several development and design hackathons and evolved into a set of Trust Indicators. The Trust Indicators are a protocol providing insight and understanding of a story, the publisher, and the journalistic process.

The Trust Protocol

The Trust Protocol was designed to inform readers and machine platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Bing. These platforms have agreed to collaborate with the Trust Project in surfacing the indicators to help readers determine the reliability of journalism on their platforms.

The Economist was a partner in developing the Trust Protocol and implementing the MVP phase alongside 14 other leading news organizations. The Protocol relies on Schema.org standards and the Project has worked closely with Schema.org to add Trust Indicators to the relevant schemas. This structured data layer can be validated against Google’s structure data validator tool and exposed to external platforms in a website’s HTML markup.

There are three primary data structures required to fulfill the Trust Protocol: NewsMediaOrganization, NewsArticle, and Person. Below is an overview of implementing these schemas at the Economist, which can serve as a guide for getting started with the Protocol in your own organization. Additional samples can be found at The Trust Project Github.

NewsMediaOrganization

The NewsMediaOrganization schema contains the primary information about the publisher.

At The Economist, content is modeled in a JSON structure aligned with Schema.org standards and publisher information is stored alongside our internally managed Economist Group Wikidata entry.

{
 "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-  economist#contact-us",
 "contactPoint": [{
   "@type": "ContactPoint",
   "contactType": "Newsroom Contact",
   "telephone": "+44 (0) 20 7830 7000",
   "email": "letters@economist.com",
   "url": "https://stage.economist.com/about-the-economist/#contact-us"
  },
  {
   "@type": "ContactPoint",
   "contactType": "Public Engagement",
   "email": "letters@economist.com",
   "url": "https://stage.economist.com/about-the-economist/#audience-engagement"
  }
 ],
 "correctionsPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#corrections",
 "description": "Media company headquartered in London, United Kingdom",
 "diversityPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#diversity-policy",
 "diversityStaffingReport": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#staff-diversity-data",
 "ethicsPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#ethics",
 "foundingDate": "1843-02-09T00:00:00Z",
 "headline": "Economist Group",
 "id": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q474153",
 "inLanguage": "en",
 "keyword": [
  "The Economist Group",
  "The Economist Newspaper Limited"
 ],
 "license": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/",
 "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#ownership",
 "masthead": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#governance",
 "missionCoveragePrioritiesPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#editorial-philosophy",
 "type": [
  "NewsMediaOrganization"
 ],
 "verificationFactCheckingPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#fact-checking-standards",
 "unnamedSourcesPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#unnamed-sources",
 "url": {
  "canonical": "http://www.economistgroup.com/"
 }
}

For machine consumption, The NewsMediaOrganization data is required to be present on a website’s landing page for the best practices. At The Economist, the data is included on our About Us page, which includes our Trust Project Best Practices. The data is exposed as a JSON object in the page’s HTML markup, inside the HEAD element.

< script type = "application/ld+json" > {
 "ethicsPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#ethics",
 "diversityPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#diversity-policy",
 "diversityStaffingReport": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#staff-diversity-data",
 "correctionsPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#corrections",
 "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#ownership",
 "masthead": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#governance",
 "missionCoveragePrioritiesPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#editorial-philosophy",
 "verificationFactCheckingPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#fact-checking-standards",
 "unnamedSourcesPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#unnamed-sources",
 "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#contact-us",
 "foundingDate": "1843-02-09T00:00:00Z",
 "@context": "http://schema.org",
 "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
 "name": "The Economist"
} < /script>

To implement this schema in your own organization, assuming you’ve already developed the content, designate a page for the primary location of Best Practices. Collect the links required for the Best Practice Indicators and ensure they are organized in the NewsMediaOrganization schema in your data layer. Then expose these in the HTML markup of your Best Practices landing page.

NewsArticle

The NewsArticle schema holds data specific to a particular piece of content.

News — Text label: ReportageNewsArticle
Internal Original Documents and Data — [URLs]: citation
External Original Documents and Data — [URLs]: citation
Secondary News Sources — [URLs]

The Economist content structure is based on the NewsArticle schema so the protocol implementation required adding the Project specific fields such as publishingPrinciples and citations.

{
 "id": "21730808",
 "type": [
  "NewsArticle",
  "AnalysisNewsArticle"
 ],
 "datePublished": "2017-10-31T00:01:19Z",
 "title": "The political economy of witchcraft",
 "url": {
  "canonical":   "http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/10/daily-chart-21",
  "alias": [
   "http://www.economist.com/node/21730808"
  ]
 },
 "citations": [
  "http://old.absentis.org/ergotism/oster_weater_witches.pdf",
  "https://sites.google.com/site/corneliuseconomics/home",
  "http://www.peterleeson.com/"
 ]
}

While The Economist has an entire team dedicated to research and fact checking, the process is conducted outside of our primary editing tool. As a result, our citation and reference data is limited to what is directly linked in the article body. Future work will ensure references are associated directly with content, but to fulfill the Trust Protocol a Golang parser was built to extract links from body text and associate them to the citations field.

func (a *Article) processCitations() {
 body := strings.NewReader(a.Text)
 z := html.NewTokenizer(body)
 for {
  tt := z.Next()
  switch {
  case tt == html.ErrorToken:
   return
  case tt == html.StartTagToken:
   t := z.Token()
   if t.Data == "a" {
    for _, v := range t.Attr {
     if v.Key == "href" {
      a.Citations = append(a.Citations, v.Val)
      break
     }
    }
   }
  }
 }
}

The NewsArticle data is also exposed in an article’s HEAD element as a JSON object.

< script type = "application/ld+json" > {
 "@context": "http://schema.org",
 "@type": ["NewsArticle", "AnalysisNewsArticle"],
 "url": "https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/10/daily-chart-21",
 "publisher": {
  "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
  "name": "The Economist",
  "publishingPrinciples": "https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist"
 },
 "headline": "The political economy of witchcraft",
 "mainEntityOfPage": "https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/10/daily-chart-21",
 "citation": ["http://old.absentis.org/ergotism/oster_weater_witches.pdf", "https://sites.google.com/site/corneliuseconomics/home", "http://www.peterleeson.com/"]
} < /script>

At The Economist we struct a balance between autogenerated data, such as citations, an editorial curated information, such as article types. Each organization should evaluate what their content editing systems and editorial workflows will provide and how they can supplement it with calculated values in order to fulfill the Protocol requirements.

Person

Articles with a byline use the Person schema to provide information about the author.

Name (byline) — Text: name
Location — {place,state,country} and/or latlong: workLocation
Languages Spoken — BCP-47 codes, e.g. “en-UK”: knowsLanguage
Areas of Expertise — Text: knowsAbout
Biography — Text: description
Contact Details — Email,phone,URL: contactPoint
Persistent ID — Social handle URL, sameAs
Affiliation with Publisher — Text: jobTitle
Archive — URL: sameAs
Author/Reporter Page Link — URL: sameAs

The Person data is mapped to the author field on the Article and included in the HTML markup.

<script type=”application/ld+json”>
 {“@context”:”http://schema.org”,
 “@type”:”ReportageNewsArticle”,
 “author”:{“@type”:”Person”,”name”:”Jane Doe”,”sameAs”:[“https://twitter.com/janedoe”, “http://www.economist.com/janedoe"]}}
 </script>

For organizations without a byline, such as The Economist, a byline exception policy is still being developed and will be implemented in the near future. It is our hope that including an explanation on why we don’t use bylines and information on our editorial staff will provide enough transparency for reader to evaluate how the article was written and the expertise supporting it. Including links to specific methodology for an article is another avenue we will explore for providing more context on how an article is researched and developed.

Beyond MVP

The Trust Protocol indicators will continue to evolve as user feedback is collected and news organizations share their perspectives. The Economist is currently working with UX and Analytics to design trust specific research questions and analytics data points in order to analyze the impact of these indicators, especially in Social Media channels.

Critical to the success of the Trust Project is additional news organizations taking the initiative to apply the Protocol. The more readers recognize the Trust Logo and seek out the Trust Indicators, the more we can elevate quality journalism. I encourage writers and engineers both to check out the The Trust Project site for further information and join the movement to restore trust in journalism.

Implementing the Trust Protocol

Written by Jonas