A reputable, third-party reviewer could elevate quality journalism, fight fake news, and restore trust in the media

How often have you heard the phrase “Everyone is a publisher?” Probably enough times to make you sick, but only because it’s true. Brands, publishers, organizations, and individuals of every kind have the power to tell their own stories now.

But it’s clear that, in many cases, this power has not been paired with responsibility (apologies to Uncle Ben). When the economic incentive to create fake news, or to use clickbait and other deceptive referral tactics, outweighs the moral imperative to conduct ethical journalism and respect your audience’s online experience and expectations of privacy, you know there is a systemic problem to reckon with.

Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, had an interesting observation in CMI’s latest weekly newsletter. He compared the current content landscape with the North American video game crash of 1983.

Everyone wanted a piece of the action. Hundreds of companies entered the market after the original few found success. But instead of producing high-quality efforts, there was a rush to be first-to-market, which resulted in poorly designed games. Even the high-quality game producers started to produce as many games as possible, cutting corners, in some cases, to get their titles out to market. In no time at all, every retailer had hundreds of new games for video-game consumers to choose from.

Then, the demand for games dropped off a cliff, and the industry went from $2 billion to just $100 million in 1985 — a drop of over 90%. Over the next few years, all the low-cost, rush to market game creators left the industry for other opportunities or went out of business… but a handful of game creators stayed, and turned their focus to creating the highest-quality games possible.

Though Pulizzi wrote this as a specific reaction to the current state of content marketing, I think it matches very well with the state of the media today, how it is perceived by audiences, and the course corrections required to reestablish trust and fight against bad-faith actors.

In short, if everyone can be a publisher, maybe everyone shouldn’t be considered a quality publisher.

The Guardian. Western Journalism. NBC News. Breitbart. The Poughkeepsie Journal. The DC Gazette. How can you tell, at a glance, whether a news source is reliable or not? How do you know whether you can trust it? It’s difficult to distinguish credibility from fraud unless you already know the publisher in question. And even if you do know it, how do you know that its standards have not eroded over time?

Loyal readers of the New York Daily News were probably surprised to learn about their local newspaper’s diminishing editorial oversight. The same goes for readers of Rolling Stone after its own “avoidable editorial failure.”

To what extent can a reader learn about a publisher’s editorial standards through a social media link? Is a publisher’s business ethics apparent in a livestream? It is almost impossible to tell—certainly not when it is placed among thousands of other real and imposter media sites.

The outcome of the video game crash is, in my opinion, the same ideal outcome as in the media industry today. The success of economically sustainable news organizations, all committed to quality, ethical journalism and the failure of fake news disseminators and journalistic imitators. But how do we get to that goal when wherever we look today we see misinformation thriving?

Nintendo’s response to the crash was its famous “Seal of Quality”: A symbol of a standard of excellence that could be granted to partners who used reliable, repeatable game development practices.

Nintendo is hardly the first organization to think of something like this. What are Michelin stars, U.S. News rankings, and Consumer Reports reviews if not an attempt to highlight quality organizations and debunk imposters? I can imagine that a similar approach would be useful for media.

Facebook recently announced an effort similar to this, flagging news stories that are likely to be fake, but its process is flawed on two fronts — both for its team of independent fact checkers and for the platform itself:

It focuses on articles instead of publishers

By focusing on articles instead of the publishers behind them, you are dramatically increasing the amount of effort required to fight misinformation. Media watchdogs often fall into this trap — trying to review dozens or hundreds of articles instead of that reviewing the publisher wholesale. I think it’s a reasonable conclusion to say that organizations without solid editorial checks and balances are much more likely to produce fake news overall.

It draws attention to the negative instead of the positive

By flagging what is fake, you are drawing additional reader attention to what is fake — likely the opposite of Facebook’s intent — and has so far led to derision among partisans on the platform. Instead, creating a focus on quality is more likely to allow readers to find what they are looking for: real, quality journalism.

So instead of Facebook’s plan, I think we would be better served by an independent third-party reviewer that goes beyond trying to play Whack-a-mole with fake news—one that could reliably verify the quality within a newsroom to serve as a barometer for its reporting.

Let’s imagine that this hypothetical organization—let’s call it Quality Journalism Review (QJR)—employs a staff of editors, journalists, and organizational experts around the world. Each is tasked with continuously inspecting media organizations across a range of attributes, qualities, and processes, such as:

• To what extent is the editorial team independent of external influence?
• Are best-in-class editorial processes followed by all divisions of the newsroom?
• To what extent are business priorities, such as advertising, given a higher priority than the user experience or reasonable expectations of privacy?
• Does the organization rely on clickbait and other deceptive social media tactics to lure in readers?
• What percentage of an organization’s news coverage has been debunked by third-party fact checkers?

These factors, and plenty more, could funnel into a scorecard, and that scorecard could be used to identify the news organizations that are truly worthy of the term “journalism.” QJR’s scorecard would certainly not be one-size-fits-all—the needs of a national broadcaster differ substantially from a local newspaper—but perhaps there could be standards based on the type of coverage in question.

I bet that you’d see many of the worst repeat fake news offenders get failing grades from QJR. I’d also bet on more than a few poor grades for previously well-regarded organizations too—but that’s the point! By defining what makes a quality publisher, and separating it from the chaff, maybe we can reestablish trust in media, which is at its lowest point in recent memory.

The output—QJR’s hypothetical Seal of Quality Journalism for the best-scoring newsrooms—could be displayed alongside posts on participating social media platforms and search engines. Now, at a glance, you could separate overall quality from potential misinformation—even if you weren’t familiar with a given publisher before.

Will there be a backlash among partisan supporters when some sites are labeled as “quality” and others are not? Of course, and it will probably be stoked by the same outlets that are pushing misinformation in the first place. That’s why QJR would need to be aggressively transparent in its reporting—and media organizations are going to need to be comfortable with this.

Scoring must be completely open to the public for review, along with corresponding explanations for why an organization did, or did not, score well. This could spur some media organizations not to participate in newsroom reviews—another issue to contend with in the scorecard.

By my own admission, this is a half-baked idea. I figure there are plenty of other factors that need to be added into this proposal to make it work. Would there still be false positives and false negatives? Sure, but I think there would be fewer than we see in the current media environment. No media organization has ever gotten it right all the time, and there has to be a tolerance for isolated moments of failure within otherwise well-run newsrooms. I also don’t know how QJR would fund this effort—I leave that discussion for another day.

This won’t be the answer for fact checking everything on the internet. It won’t be a panacea for keeping individual bad-faith actors from spinning the truth. It will be difficult to avoid accusations of political and professional bias. But, if implemented properly, it might slow the currently inevitable spread of deliberate misinformation. That in itself should be a goal worth striving toward.