News Challenge Winner Martin Moore, Transparent Journalism from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Tech-minded folks who care about journalism have been arguing for years that news organizations should adopt common standards for presenting news stories online. Developing a common format for news stories would make it easier for website users to tell where a story came from and who wrote it, and make it easier for computers to sort through and compare stories, identifying patterns and improving searches.

In 2008, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust won a Knight News Challenge grant to help carry these ideas forward and create standards for news story presentation online. Thanks in part to that grant, last week saw the launch of Value Added News, a new initiative to help make news stories more transparent. The effort has already drawn the support of the Associated Press, among others. The Value Added News website likens the new standards to nutritional labels on food, “giving people the information they need to enable them to make informed choices.”

Martin Moore can probably explain this better than I can:

The idea is that by enabling straightforward, consistent mark-up of news articles, it will be easier for people producing journalism to distinguish their articles online (e.g. from commercial or government information), and make searching for those articles quicker and more intelligent.

This isn’t about the subjective stuff, rather about highlighting the who-what-where-when of a news article so that:

* A journalist, or someone producing journalism, can accurately identify their work on the web * A member of the public has more information with which to assess the provenance of an article when they’re looking at it (i.e. who wrote it, when it was first published etc.) * A member of the public can search the web using the news mark-up to focus their search * News organisations, third party aggregators, and members of the public can use the news metadata to create new ways in which to access and navigate news

We think that better signposting of news on the web will be good for journalists, good for news organisations and good for the public.

This effort to provide more structure and better metadata for news stories online is part of a larger movement towards better presentation of information online. Just as techy folks have been arguing for standards in the presentation of news stories, they’ve been doing the same for everything from government data to e-commerce information.

Watch video of Sir Tim Berners-Lee making the argument for information standards at TED: