It’s February already, but it still seems like the year has just begun. The NewsQ team has been spending the past month reflecting upon our work back in 2020, and brainstorming (designing!) what we’d like to do this year.
Here are some of our plans.
NewsQ Panels
We’re happy to announce that we’re moving ahead with a new set of panels in 2021. Last year, we focused a lot on the question of the definition of quality news itself, whether at the signal level or within the areas of science, health, local, or opinion journalism. Activities at the Social Science Research Council helped us to think through this question as well.
This year, we’re zooming out a bit, and considering the question of what makes for a quality news feed. Maybe, in other words, it’s worth not just thinking through one article compared to another, or one outlet in comparison to others, but the feed of information as a whole.
While we’re still working on the exact concepts, we can say that we plan on digging deeper into the question of news versus opinion that last year’s panel began. We’re currently asking for feedback from our NewsQ network, and will let you know as they are defined.
KNoW Science
We also began to think seriously last year about how reliable news and information can be surfaced in indirect ways, specifically on the topic of vaccine safety. We’ll be continuing on in this work in Wikipedia’s universe through our ongoing collaboration with the World Health Organization’s Vaccine Safety Net and Wikimedia DC, including the translation of information across the different language Wikipedias.
In addition, we’re beginning our work on how journalism fits into vaccine safety, as we try to think through the signals of great vaccine reporting in discussion with the good folks at MuckRock and others. We’ll be very focused on information related to COVID-19 vaccines this year as well.
Resources for the NewsQ network
Finally, we’ve also begun to consolidate our outputs so that the design-thinking activities we engage with our networks of participants can have more stuff to work from. Looking forward to building these resources out — including NewsQ’s API, database of feed snapshots, and reading library — and allowing interested collaborators see what they can make of them.
Here’s to the year ahead! The NewsQ team has high hopes for efforts to elevate quality journalism across the board.