Still Water Senior Researcher John Bell has been selected to take part in the Mozilla+Journalism news lab, the second round of this year’s MoJo Innovation Challenges. Over the next month he’ll be one of sixty participants applying the knowledge of people like Christian Heilmann, Burt Herman, Aza Raskin, John Resig, and others to the problem of redefining journalism for the open web era. You can follow his progress on his blog.
John’s submission, Re:Poste, is based on a system he prototyped at the University of Maine in 2005/2006 that attempts to apply a higher level of peer review to online news media reports:
Re:Poste was created as an attempt to bring academic-level standards of criticism and intellectual integrity to mass media journalism. In many ways it is a rethinking and refocusing of the ideas behind media watchdog blogs presented as a form of direct intervention. Where most of those blogs have tried to set themselves up as ‘citizen reporters,’ though, Re:Poste’s goal is to create a center for ‘citizen fact-checkers.’ It accomplishes this by creating a trusted network of academics, experts, and professionals who review stories in the media. Those reviews are then gathered and presented in an interface that loads directly on top of the original mass media article.