The best publishers have always known that trust has economic value. In “The Vanishing Newspaper,” I reported that advertising rates increased by $3.25 per Standard Advertising Unit (SAU) for each one percentage point increase in the persons who said they believed what they read in the paper. And papers with higher trust were more successful in resisting the long-term decline in household penetration.

That is a fascinating statistic. It’s clear that trust and perceived credibility is an increasingly important factor in the long-term success of a newspaper. With the proliferation of news sources (blogs, news sites, aggregators, mashups etc) on the web today, the only real differentiator is trust and quality. I see a “flight to quality” as an inevitable consequence of the democratization of news on the internet. But at the same time, Philip has demonstrated that its not just the soft consequences of trust we should look at. The hard numbers (ad revenues, circulation) are all correlated with the trustworthiness of news makers.

I should reiterate that I haven’t spent enough time with his raw data or book to ascertain the “trustworthiness” of his stats, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. If its even partially true, it reiterates the goals and visions we have here at NewsCred. Helping consumers find the highest quality, most trustworthy news online. By highlighting the trusted sources that the public can depend on, we think this will benefit both news readers and news producers alike.

We were doing some routine maintenance and adding a few new features late last night. Unfortunately, that ended up taking a lot longer and causing a lot more problems than we anticipated. During this window of a few hours, the site was not accessible. We had a friendly error message during most of this time, but some of you may have just gotten a blank screen. We really apologize for that - keeping the site up is our number 1 priority, and we’ve managed to do all our releases without taking the site down so far. Yesterday was an exception, and we’ve learned from that.

Once again, sincere apologies from the team. We’ll also keep you updated on progress on our blog next time.  The good news is that you can head over to NewsCred.com now and catch up on your daily news fix!

What is the leaderboard?

The NewsCred leaderboard highlights the active members of our community, and ranks them by Karma points. You earn Karma by simply being active in our community - 1 point for voting, and 2 points for commenting on an article. The more you use NewsCred, the more karma you get (and who doesn’t need more Karma?!).

We have an all-time leaderboard (top 30) and a monthly leaderboard (top 20). You can check them both out here. We’re always displaying the top users on our main homepage on the scrolling carousel at the bottom right of the page. All of you deserve the recognition.

Recognition is great. What about the moolah?

As a way of saying thank you, we want to do more than just recognize our active members.

Each month, we’ll give out a $100 dollar gift certificate for Amazon.com to the monthly leader.

That’s right. $100 to spend however you want - the idea is to buy books and other smart stuff so you can continue to fill your brains even when you aren’t on NewsCred! In addition, we’ll also profile the winner each month on our blog, so we can give our user’s a bit of fame and fortune!

So get started right away! Start reading, voting and commenting on NewsCred and you can move up the leaderboard, win cash and get karma! What’s not to love?

BTW, you should check out Steve’s blog here: http://thenumerati.net/ There’s some fascinating stuff there, especially related to his recently launched book with the same name.

Some background: At NewsCred, we aggregate news via RSS feeds from hundreds of blogs and mainstream news sources. While the aggregation is automatic, we need to fill the database with the URLs of the feeds, plus categorize each feed into one of our categories (World, US, Business, Tech etc).  I thought this would be an interesting first project since this bit is annoying, and time consuming. But its also easy. Those three factors make it ripe for Mechanical Turk awesomeness.

My project: The first thing to do is to set up a simple, repeatable task (called a HIT, or Human Intelligence Task). My hit was simple: given a news source name, go to their website and find all their RSS feeds and categorize them. To help them, I used an existing HTML template and modified it slightly: I added dropdowns next to text boxes where Turkers would enter the feed URLs so they can just easily select the category. I figured the satisfaction of manually typing in “World” a hundred times decreases exponentially. I then uploaded a CSV file with the list of sources. That’s it. Amazon would then take over and create hundred of HITs based on my HTML tempate, automatically putting in the source name from my CSV file in each HIT. Coolio.

Results: The results were simply amazing. Within a couple minutes, people started working away on my tasks. It felts like I had an army of diligent workers, scurrying away and trying to find answers as quickly as possible. The quality of responses was awesome as well. I was a bit hesitant when I decided to send each HIT to only one person (you can send it to multiple people if you want to double check or get multiple opinions). When reviewing the results, I was glad I made that choice. I rejected less than 1% of the results, and that too because I was blown away by the dedication and superb responses of 99% of Turkers. People even apologized when they thought there responses were ambiguous or maybe not correct. People asked for explanations. Complimented me on the quality of the HIT. They even signed up as NewsCred users

Takeaways: Mechincal Turk is cheap. Really cheap. I probably could have paid 2 or 3 cents per HIT. But I just couldn’t do it. I ended up paying 10 cents per HIT because I thought it would incentivize people to try harder (plus I felt bad). It still ended up being ridiculously cheap - I was paying the equivalent of 2 bucks an hour according to the stats.  Given that my entire project was done and dusted in less than 3 hours, I think this was still a fair price.  So don’t be a jerk and try and get all your HITs done for 1 cent - be kind, and they’ll be kind in return.

The best part about Mechincal Turk was the realization that there are plenty of good people in this world.  These Turkers actually seemed to enjoy doing their tasks. From what I’ve read, they enjoy the challenge of the investigation, and especially enjoy HITs that are submitted by people who appreciate their work. I profusely thanked them in my HIT HTML form, and asked for comments/suggestions. I got a lot of responses, and even new users for NewsCred.

My only gripe: I wish I could go back and individually thank some of the Turkers. I tried, but could not find anything on the website that allowed me to contact them or message them via the Amazon site.

Mechanical  Turk is awesome. Another example where the aggregate knowledge/skills/power of the community far outweighs what we could each do individually. A place where ordinary people can do extraordinary things? Of course.

P.S. <start cheesiness> I also have to give a shout out to my beautiful wife - who puts up with all the craziness of a startup-obsessed husband. Quitting my job to work on NewsCred full time was the best decision of my life, and she’s supported it from the word go. So thank you. </end cheesiness>

The real test for such an initiative is if they themselves can eliminate any bias in their coverage. From my initial look, it seems like there are fact-checking files on both candidates, and the site attempts to be as fair and transparent as possible. There is a compelling consumer demand for the truth, especially on matters that can affect their daily lives for the next four years, so this is the type of journalism we need more of! Check out their “Pants-On-Fire” widget below…

DotSpots is an online ‘web-page annotator’ with a twist. According to their press blurb, “the first release of the DotSpots will focus on improving online news (mainstream media, blogosphere and citizen journalists), by identifying and indexing semantically similar content across millions of news sites and blogs, while empowering bloggers and individuals to annotate text on their local favorite sites with comments, videos and photos.”

Similarly, SpinSpotter is trying to solve the problem of news media bias. Their goal is to highlight ’spin’ on web pages (defined by a Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics). It requires a plugin (c’mon guys, plugin??)that will highlight phrases or words in a news article that might indicate spin or bias.  According to their founder, Todd Herman, “Our mission is to make news media transparent.”

So why am I intrigued? I think both of these startups could provide valuable tools for the NewsCred community. It’s refreshing to see startups continue to emerge in this space with similar visions. Of course, their execution is very different from that of NewsCred, but the distribution possibilities make it an intriguing match. I wish them the best, and I’ll definitely be getting in touch!

From Jessica Hagy’s blog, via DigiDave.

Interesting that the two biggest words are “news” and “quality.” If you think this is neat, head on over to http://www.wordle.net and get your own!