The topic box on the new site is not giving me a dropdown box. I am finding it confusing when I submit a story to not be able to select a topic area as before. I always thought the topic entry section was a little cumbersome, but this seems a bit too open ended and indefinite.

It looks like this got fixed/enhanced now. Good fix.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I am trying to submit a story and get a response window saying 405 Not Allowed
nginx/0.6.32

Any clues as to cause?

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

More crashes and error messages when submitting today. Can’t reliably submit. Also tried to search for health articles and found that the first one listed was from April, 2007.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I’m confused. I just reviewed a story that had been reviewed by two others. At the top of the review summary, 3 reviewers were noted. Under “Popularity,” # Reviews 1.5???

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

Hi Debbie, your point is well taken. As we are a principally community driven site, we urge our members to post high quality stories that are not getting the coverage they deserve. Using our story submission tool , you can easily submit stories yourself. For additional help, see our Reviewer FAQ.

In response to comment by Debbie Shapiro.

Do you consider academic sources to not be popular enough to include as “good journalism”? The Administration blatantly IGNORED hundreds of academic economists and their carefully offered opinions with respect to the current financial/economic crisis. If such voices are ignored because they are not popular “journalists”, how can such informed opinion (with unusual exceptions such as Paul Krugman) contribute to a meaningful and timely public discourse?

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I can’t find a “suggestion box”, and I wanted to comment on the Fairness and Balance debate summary. Your summary is a good one, especially the links at the end to resources on fairness and balance on journalism websites.

Fairness and balance have become a joke in journalism ever since Fox hijacked the phrase, and since the fairness and balance rules for the media were thrown out by Reagan, IIRC.

The main problem is that every idea, no matter how looney, is supposed to be given equal time and equal respect, whether it deserves it or not. This is related to the situation where, too often, the role of reporter is reduced to mere stenography, repeating the talking points that each side offers, without any attempt to evaluate their merits, either on logical grounds or on the basis of evidence.

As news organizations continue to be pressured to cut staff, the temptation will be to become mere stenographers for every special interest that comes along. Sometimes it seems that the hard work of evaluation is neglected.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I had a couple of observations: a couple of times when I’ve tried to submit stories that someone else has posted, I get a message that says “that URL is taken” and I can’t do anything else. Any chance it could auto-forward to review the story?

Also, I tend to post a lot of links—many of which are background information, not stories needing review. Any way to designate those differently?

And one more thing—I often would re-arrange the links and/or comments after I’ve keyed them in. Any chance we could shuffle them at will without cutting and pasting or retyping?

So much for constructive thoughts for the night—-and Thanks for all you do!

Marsha Iverson

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

Being new to your site, i’ve found it to be a great way to get my opinion out so my head doesn’t explode. Thanks
Being new to the internet , I’m trying to teach myself, I have trouble navigating sometimes, but I’ll get the hang of it. On the Submit side, I did manage to get one on, after trail and error.
My only problem with the columns is that they are mostly submitted by the same people. But, I think in the future more people will submit, I know I’ll get the hang of it. I will submit somemore in the near future.
I like the way that the scoring is done, being not just one source.

So thanks, good job.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

There’s an easy way to ensure your NewsTrust profile is hidden from search engines. Once you’re logged into the site, click on the My Account link at the top, right corner of any NewsTrust page. In the Membership tab, uncheck the “Show my Profile” box in the Other Members Settings section. Finally, click ‘Save’ at the bottom of the page.

It may take up to several weeks for the cached version of your NewsTrust profile to be removed from the search engine’s records.

Check out the Member FAQ for more information on your account settings.

In response to comment by Joe Molen.

I read the rules and the scoring formula, but it seems to me that the scoring weighs time more heavily than whether the answer is correct. My score went up 1 point for a correct answer – after about 2/3 of the time was used – on a question that 2/3 got right. I then got -7 points for a wrong answer that 3/4 got right.

Seems to me that a correct answer is more important than speed – thus slowness should discount the ‘winnings’ by less than half.

What’s wrong with thinking about the news / questions?

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

You missed the most important news about education. Look at www.TMEducation.org, www.stressfreeschools.org, www.mum.edu, www.TMBusiness.org. What’s the result of this education? Do search for “yogic flying.” Look at www.permanentpeace.org. What do they know that you don’t—but should?

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

My suggestion is to add a ‘message’ option, so that members can send messages to eachother without disclosing their e-mail address. I came here looking for James Canning, to let him know I have been kicked off of the financial times blogs for a year, I suppose for some comments made about the British. Maybe you could forward that message?

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I’m getting a little better idea about this effort. I think if you want to expand your market beyond journalism students, you should add a page called ‘What is Good Journalism?’ or something like that where you outline the modern undstanding of the principles of good journalism in a tutorial. I have never heard of such a thing until now, but I realise from reading some of the posts that you could provide a brief tutorial that would be helpful to the public. On that page, you should probably include an introduction to the idea of classic, original, diary-type journalism also. I hope you find any of these suggestions helpful.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

Perhaps it’s me. Or perhaps it’s because the Colorado winter has kicked in since April has begun and snow has finally begun. Or perhaps it’s because Bush and Cheney have achieved the status, “When are we going to prosecute the lying Bastards?” Or perhaps it’s because Obama has re-instituted the rule of law and rule of law is boring. Or perhaps, God forbid, at my age (73) I’m easily bored. At any rate, NewsTrust articles have reached the status of, “Who really gives a shit?” And that represents a dilemma for both of us. What shall we do? Cancel my participation? That’s where I’m headed.

Jack Dinkmeyer

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I have always hesitated to sign up for Newstrust, because, like many in the webspace, I feel that it’s wrong and anti-democratic to require people to use their real identities just to read and comment on the news. I can understand requiring it for reviewers of news, but for ordinary readers?

What if my opinions are controversial? What if I don’t choose to have my friends, family, church, or employer know what kind of material I am reading or opining about? Many things on the net would never have surfaced, but for at least the appearance of anonymity.

I find it very troubling that so many online community pioneers, who know the value of Internet anonymity would sanction this enterprise in this form. I have no intention of supporting it, or using it, so long as there is no way to interact without using my real identity. Facebook is already under fire for canceling accounts of bloggers who use pseudonyms. Do you plan to do the same?
(continues next post.)

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

As you go into the redesign, one of the areas I would like to see is way to get in touch with other reviewers who don’t want their personal emails revealed, but in a community such as this where we rate each other, it would be nice to ask or explain a rating. With the number of throw away email addresses available, it would be simple to require a response address in order to submit a story or rate another reviewer.

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

This week we’re hosting a special News Hunt on the Economy, with a new twist. Rather than covering one broad topic as we have in the past, we’ll focus on clusters of related stories on economy sub-topics such as: jobs, poverty, or the credit card industry (today’s feature).

Each day this week, the featured story on our home page will include links to related stories which we’ll ask you to compare. Help create our News Comparison service by reviewing stories on our home page, as well as our related stories on the same topic.

We also invite you to link (or submit) more related stories on this week’s featured topics. When you have reviewed a couple stories on a topic, please write a comment in your review, or click the Like button to let us know which story you found most informative.

This experiment is a response to the sweeping support our News Comparison idea in last week’s survey on the future of NewsTrust.

Please let us know what you think. Thanks in advance!

In response to comment by NewsTrust Staff.

I love it! Thank you so much for this idea. I have not been able to write reviews lately but I do read aka “quick look” Newstrust and these comparisons have been terrific. Once upon time, when I wasn’t so busy, I use to do it myself but now, Newstrust is doing it. To me, it’s the only way to learn about what’s going on by comparing how others (i.e. countries) view what’s going on with us and other situtions in our world. Amrica isn’t the truthsayer as we once were, if we ever were, anymore.

Thank you, again!!

Deborah

Peace

In response to comment by Kaizar Campwala.

RW Ziegler,

Thanks for your great feedback!

Your good recommendations will help us expand our current prototype, to provide a special ‘News Comparison’ page in coming weeks.

As a starting point, we could provide a sub-topic page focusing on the particular news event we’re comparing (rather than a broader topic, as we do now). That page would feature the 3-4 stories that are being compared, with a couple member and editor reviews below each of them. We could also add a discussion on that page, as well as a short list of other related stories.

In any case, many thanks for helping us improve our site to better serve your needs. Your thoughtful feedback is invaluable to us – it’s people like you that make NewsTrust possible!

In response to comment by RW Ziegler.

I am a little overwhelmed with your service—and I love the service. I am trying to see how I read/compare/comment/link/focus/submit. I am not sure what all these like terms mean—they take me to different pages. Maybe a vocabulary page would be in order. Sorry for being a little dense.

RWZ

In response to comment by Fabrice Florin.

Hi Lee,

Thanks for your comment.

Both Slate and The Root are owned by the Washington Post Company. Therefore, we list them as mainstream.

For more information on how we define mainstream and independent media, check out the section on source ownership in our Host FAQ:
http://newstrust.net/help/faq/host/#mainstream_media

Thanks,

Derek Hawkins
Assistant Editor
NewsTrust

In response to comment by Lee Richardson.

Hi Brad,
Thank you for taking the time to comment. We appreciate your frustration on the usability issue. So much so, in fact, that NT team is hard at work this summer redesigning certain aspects of the site to make it more usable, and creating new features to make it more useful.

Regarding the aggressive marketing, are you referring to the registration pop-up when you click to review a story? If so, we’re moving to a more integrated review form in the coming months, so you won’t get multiple popup windows in your browser when reading stories on the site.

So thanks for signing up, and stay tuned a better NewsTrust experience soon. In the mean time, Try submitting or reviewing a story or two on NewsTrust. It’ll change the way you consume the news, and help guide your fellow citizens to good journalism online.

Kaizar Campwala
Associate Editor, NewsTrust

In response to comment by brad.