Cour­tesy: bmoreblog.newstrust.net

The Nose found its shabby self down at the Har­bor East tea bar Tea­v­olve March 15, fill­ing up on cheese cubes and hummus-schmeared pita tri­an­gles and bal­anc­ing a beer, all while actu­ally try­ing to think. We were there to chat up the social media types behind the New­sTrust Bal­ti­more project–which we’ll get to in a bit–but first we had to do a lit­tle navel-gazing.

Orga­niz­ers asked us to answer a ques­tion, “Why does Bal­ti­more need good jour­nal­ism?” We scratched our heads, then jot­ted a cou­ple apho­risms with the mark­ers and paper they handed out. New­sTrust Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Fab­rice Florin was on hand–he lives in San Francisco–and one of his jobs that night was to snap pic­tures, lit­er­ally hold­ing us to our words, with our com­ments held below our chins like mugshot IDs.

The exper­i­ment Florin leads, New­sTrust, is a six-year-old non­profit jour­nal­ism project whose stated goal is to ele­vate the best journalism–whether it’s pub­lished in tra­di­tional media or blogs–by using teams of review­ers and writ­ers whose rep­u­ta­tions increase as they prove to their peers their crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties. Peo­ple sub­mit sto­ries, Digg– or Red­dit–style; the sto­ries are read, rated, and com­mented on. The best-reported, best-researched, most-fair, etc., hope­fully, rise to the top. There are no anony­mous com­menters on New­sTrust, there are no flame wars, no bury­ing, no games. Just recently, for exam­ple, New­sTrust led us to an excel­lent arti­cle in Ars Tech­nica, explain­ing the nuclear cri­sis in Japan.

It’s actu­ally kinda refresh­ing when con­trasted with the internet’s anar­chic, anony­mous opinion-overloaded landscape.

We’ve come to appre­ci­ate the Bal­ti­more New­sTrust site because we often get good feed­back on our sto­ries. A cou­ple weeks ago, we signed on as a New­sTrust part­ner, along with sev­eral other local media out­lets, which means we’ll help their mis­sion pro­mot­ing good local jour­nal­ism. Other part­ners include the city’s major news out­lets, a few respected blogs, and a hand­ful of local col­leges. News Trust got its startup money from the Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tions, and recently won a few more months of funding.

Since Feb­ru­ary, Bal­ti­more is the first city to use the model for local news, and it’s been catch­ing on in jour­nal­ism circles.

So we’re curi­ous to see whether it gets trac­tion beyond jour­nal­ism, think tank, and col­lege cir­cuits. In short, will New­sTrust end up a go-to source for local news? We’re watching.

Oh, and the plac­ards? Amid the snarls about cor­rup­tion and appeals to cit­i­zen­ship some­one wrote sim­ply, “Because we deserve it.”

Tags: Baltimore, journalism watchdogs, local media, NewsTrust