Journalbase is a product that aims to encourage users to learn more about the authors of artciles they read on the internet.

The ethical and UX problem we are trying to solve

Do you ever read a news article and wish you knew a more about the author? News articles usually provide readers with a byline attributed to the content creator/s. How do we determine whether a journalist’s credentials are legitimate? Credibility is often connected to the publication a journalist works for. While credibility should be applied here, there should be more pressure on how stories are assigned and who can reliably tell what story. Even if news organizations may be covering more diverse topics, the authorship may not necessarily reflect the same levels of diversity and that’s a problem. Marginalized voices aren’t being represented. News media publications do a poor job of providing consumers with a quick and easy way to get in contact with journalists and supply more context.

Here is an example of the problem we're trying to solve on the New York Post website. Readers should have access to quality information about writers, not just a vague list of what they wrote.

Here are examples of the problem on the Vice website. Some news sites provide little to no information about the point of veiw of the people writing their articles. And don’t include social media links.

An Objective Front but Deceptive Practice

The average person tends to care a lot about how their food is made and where it comes from. If they know its made inhumanely, isn’t organic, is expired, etc., they won’t touch it. Growers and producers take this into account while making food for public consumption, and often times it has increased the quality of our food.

This issue can be applied to journalism in it's own way; what if we can introduce a similar movement for writers? The goal is to better expose writers to readers; who are these writers? Where have they appeared? What kind of reporting do they specialize in?

Some sites don’t offer enough information about their writers, such as The New York Post. The New York Times is a good example of this issue being corrected; when you click on the byline, you are taken to a bio of the author and their work is displayed below. Sites like the New York Post and Vice just show a laundry list of articles they have written. Even the Times can improve their author bios. We can add things like a credibility rating and the background of the writer. The overall goal of our project is to introduce more transparency between writers and readers, which would then lead to more trust between them.

Who Tells Our Stories?

The future of this problem without our product:

The future of journalism’s transparency is twofold. On the one hand, as people understand technology better, sites might highlight their employees in more creative ways and provide readers with easier ways to get in contact with the journalist. On the other hand, most news sites hold their credibility as the entire publication. This may translate into the refusal to make improvements on this issue, because they want their articles to appear objective rather than the perspective or voice of a specific journalist.

In the future news publications may create databases designed to provide more insight about their employees to create stronger levels of transparency across the industry. This level of transparency may also lead to more hires, when the lack of diversity across news media companies becomes more clear to the public.

Journalbase

Our product/solution:

Our proposed solution to this problem is a database that documents all journalists who have ever written an article. This product is for everyone who reads articles online and wants to know more about the author of the article they are reading. Each journalist has a profile with information about their educational background, work experience, topics of interest and any other information necessary to create a substantial bio. When a news consumer is reading an article, they can access the information from the journalist profile by hovering over the author’s name. The reader can also search for the journalist in the database separately.

This is how our product would appear on a tradional article webpage delivered as a browser extension on desktop.

This project conception focuses on identifying the problem and proposing this user interaction from within a news article that will solve this problem. The exact details and feasibility of implementation are yet to be resolved! We are assuming that we already have all the information of all journalists necessary for a hover over in any article without worrying about the feasibility of collecting all of this information. On mobile, since hover isn’t feasible, we would in place use a tap and hold feauture similar to Twitter.

Currently, each journalist profile has the journalist’s name, education, current employment, their speciality if they have one, social media links and all of the articles that they have written. Journalists who write for more than one news company will have all of the articles that they have written, regardless of the company that published them. The database also allows future opportunities for filtering and sorting the information on journalist profiles. In this design iteration, we are focused on the main functionality of the application: viewing journalist profiles in articles and on the database website. Further functionality for the database website, such as filtering, will be created in future iterations.

The information on the site will be collected by our team, rather than the journalists themselves. This method will keep the information as transparent as possible by eliminating the possibility of journalists hiding information. Journalbase will help to weed out journalists that aren’t good at their jobs. It will hold them more accountable if everything they write is associated with their profile. The trade off to this method is that it will limit the information on the site to information that is already in the public sphere. If a journalist wishes, they can “claim” their profile, and take responsibility for the content displayed on the page. This will allow them to add content that was not already collected by the Journalbase team. If a journalist has a problem with some information presented on their profile, they cannot delete it directly, but can “contest” the information, explain why they would not like it displayed on their profile and the Journalbase team will review it. The reader will see whether or not the journalist has “claimed” their page or not in the journalist profile.

Questions have arose about how the information will be collected. Who is considered a journalist and who is not? What can we do for sites that already give clear information about journalists? What information is important to include about each journalist? How could a database of all journalist be used in other ways? What options should there be for sorting or filtering the information in this database? How do we know the plug-in is being used?

Our Team