Knight Foundation Awards Timothy Berners-Lee $350,000 for Transparency in Journalism Project

The Wall Street Journal and Mashable are reporting that the Knight Foundation Award will be given to the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative for the development of tools and standards to enable journalists, and those producing journalism, to distinguish their work from other content on the web (e.g. commercial, government, personal etc.), by tagging so that the public can search for news more intelligently, and assess it better when they find it.

About the project (quoting from Mashable):

With the copious amounts of information – and misinformation – on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

Read more about it at Mashable. [JH]