In 2008, the Media Standards Trust won a Knight News Challenge grant to create a system that helps readers determine where a news article originates.’ Their project uses metadata to show who wrote the piece, its source organization, its title, and when it published ‘ among other things – on any news content. They called this news microformat hNews and worked with the Associated Press in the latter stages to develop it.

The project, run in partnership with Tim Berners-Lee’s Web Science Trust, also received a MacArthur Foundation grant.

Two years later, hNews has been implemented on over 577 news sites in the US alone. ‘The tool makes the origin of news articles more transparent ‘ meaning readers can more easily tell an article’s source, and authors and publishers get more credit for their work. hNews has been used in the Associated Press News Registry application to track its news around the web to work out revenue sharing opportunities for content, Martin Moore, the director of the Media Standards Trust, writes on the Media Shift blog.

hNews is an open source project.  If you want to install hNews on your site you can get it here, and you can see all of the 577 sites already using it here.