Background

The Media Standards Trust in association with the Web Science Research Initiative has been given a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and Knight News Challenge award from the Knight Foundation to explore and develop ways in which to help people find and assess news content on the web.

Since 2008 we have been researching and developing methodologies to make the provenance of news more transparent (i.e. more ‘machine-readable’) for the benefit of news organisations, journalists and the public.

This is not about pejorative or judgmental information, rather the basic who, what, when and where of a news article. The equivalent, if you like, of ingredients of the side of a food packet - giving people the information they need to enable them to make informed choices.

It tells people reading the article (or searching for it):

• Who wrote it
• What its title is
• Where the article starts and ends
• Who it was published by
• What source organisation – if any – it comes from
• When it was first published
• When it was changed since publication
• What rights are associated with it
• What journalistic codes of practices (if any) it adheres to

The purpose of Value Added News is to make basic information about the authorship and edit history of an online news article distinct and consistent such that:

• A journalist, or someone producing journalism, can be sure their work is accurately identified on the web
• A journalist, or someone producing journalism, can be transparent about the authorship and edit history of their work
• A member of the public has more information with which to assess an article’s authority and credibility when they are looking at it
• A member of the public can search the web using the transparent news information to focus their search
• News organisations, third party aggregators, and members of the public can use the transparent news metadata to create new ways in which to access and navigate news

Though it has been developed for news text articles there is no reason why it should not be adapted for use with audio or video content.

This, the first version of Value Added News, has been developed to be as simple, usable, and extensible as possible and builds on pre-existing microformats, particularly hAtom.

How did we come to decide on microformats and RDFa?

A microformat is a simple set of conventions for web pages. It is designed to be human readable, but also to enable automatic extraction of the semantic information (for a background on microformats, see http://microformats.org)

Microformats are - as the originators explain:

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns.”

The principles of microformats fit very well with the principles underlying the news transparency initiative:

• Solve a specific problem
• Start as simple as possible
• Design for humans first, machines second
• Re-use building blocks from widely adopted standards
• Modularity/embeddability
• Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

Microformats are an open standard that can be easily supported by 3rd party application developers once the format is published, enabling writers and editors to easily generate microformats for their articles as an integrated step in the production process.

Microformats are also well-suited for programmers to “bring to life” using browser-based scripting language, such as Javascript. This is because the combination of mark-up and CSS class names enables any script to view the microformat as a distinct “object” on the page. The script will be able to “see” each part of the microformat even if it is hidden from the human user of the site, and interact with it or assign behaviours to it.

We also intend to identify the same information using RDFa (Resource Description Framework - in - attributes) but decided to start with microformats since they are easier to use and currently more well used on the web.