The eight indicators provided by the Trust Project for evaluating the validity and trustworthiness of a news source include: journalist info, labels, references, local, diverse voices, actionable feedback, methods, and best practices. For this assignment, I decided to analyze the Arizona Mirror, a website I’m familiar with and peruse from time-to-time, and Arizona Silver Belt, a website I had never heard of before.
Arizona Mirror is a nonprofit newsroom, and while I couldn’t find information on Arizona Silver Belt’s nonprofit status, its Twitter bio claims it’s the oldest weekly newspaper in Arizona, serving Globe-Miami since 1878. A dated site affiliated with the Arizona state library archives and records says that the Weekly Arizonian, which later became the now-defunct Tucson Citizen, was the first newspaper in Arizona.
I first looked at the Arizona Mirror. Since I’ve read pieces from this site before, I’m more familiar with the stories their small staff tends to tackle. Arizona Mirror has a fairly extensive about page on their site, which includes information on their ethics, funding and privacy policy. They also have biographies for their small staff, most of whom are seasoned reporters and journalists who have bylines in other Arizona publications. Their freelancers also have bios at the bottom of their stories, adding to the credibility of the publication. My assessment of the Arizona Mirror is that their staff can be considered experts in their field.
Being that Arizona Mirror is a nonprofit newsroom, it’s crucial that they’re transparent about their funding and the way those influences affect their coverage and editorial decision making. According to the publication’s funding page, the Mirror maintains “a strict separation between our funding and our journalism. We don’t accept corporate donations or underwriting, nor do we accept donations from foreign governments or anonymous sources.” The Mirror calls its opinion columns “commentary,” which I think could hinder some readers’ ability to distinguish the opinion content from the news content.
One of the top stories on the Arizona Mirror site when I was writing this post was about a student walkout over anti-LGBT legislation passed by the state legisulature earlier this year. Many of the hyperlinks included in the article take the user to another Mirror article, which I think should be viewed as a positive as it shows the extent of which the news organization has done reporting on the issue at hand.
Another Arizona Mirror article by the same reporter who wrote the first article I cited only includes one hyperlink in the body of the story, which takes the user to a separate Arizona Mirror piece — written by the same journalist. I think the Mirror’s efforts to link other articles on their site makes sense; news organizations are vying for engagement, and including multiple opportunities for users to read the organization's stories aids the Arizona Mirror in this. On the other hand, I think it would be better to clearly label those stories as other articles from the Arizona Mirror when hyperlinking them in an article.
Being a hyperlocal news publication, the Arizona Mirror succeeds in covering issues directly impacting Arizonans on a regular basis. Arizona Mirror occasionally acts as a wire service, pulling reports from other news organizations to aggregate and reshare on their homepage. One recent example is this article from Jen Fifield, a former Arizona Republic reporter who now works for Votebeat, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to covering elections and voting.
I decided to search “how trustworthy is the Arizona Mirror” in Google and found this page from InfuenceWatch, a project from Capital Research Group — a conservative nonprofit that takes aim at organizations and entities it views as supporting liberal causes. InfluenceWatch categorizes the Arizona Mirror as left-of-center and looks at its staff’s biases and its funding streams.
Overall, despite Arizona having a clear left slant in its opinion columns, the coverage this publication produces is trustworthy and transparent. The Arizona Mirror gives information on its ethics, is a localized publication and is transparent about its fundraising. I think the Arizona Mirror could be even more transparent about its funding and its relationship with its parent company. I think the reporters who work for the Arizona Mirror are trustworthy, and their work helps the publication meet the eight indicators.
The next news publication I chose to analyze and compare to the Trust Project’s eight metrics of trustworthiness was the Arizona Silver Belt, a publication covering stories related to Globe and Miami. My first impression of the site was that it was not optimized for user experience — there’s ads littered around the site in jarring ways, and the stories themselves aren’t displayed in an enticing way.
I navigated to the contact us section of the Silver Belt’s site and found the names of two editors who were affiliated with the organization. Andrea Justice and David Sowers are listed as the editor and assistant editor, respectively. A brief Google search of Andrea Justice coupled with some keywords like editor, reporter and the name of the publication I’m researching rendered some bylines of hers in other Globe-specific publications, but nothing that was particularly indicative of her trustworthiness as a journalist or editor. One editor’s note on the Silver Belt’s site with Justice’s byline includes a note that “The Arizona Silver Belt is growing. Today our staff continues to develop interesting content for our dedicated readers under a guise that is neither red nor blue but simply honest.”
The Silver Belt website also heavily promotes sponsored content from advertisers, and it doesn’t describe where it gets the content from or how. Sponsored articles range from quizzes to tell you if you’re secretly depressed to tips for men on how to mitigate their erectile dysfunction — without Viagra, I might add. This sponsored content is not labeled effectively and can easily be confused with the normal content that this publication puts on their site.
Some of the top articles on the Silver Belt’s site are pulled from news wires from the Associated Press, including this article that has the same header image as the Associated Press version of the story. Overall their content is not labeled well and leads me to not trust the publication as a whole.
I don’t think the Silver Belt uses local knowledge, nor does it do a good job of bringing in diverse perspectives. Because many of the articles published on their website don’t come from original reporting, it makes it hard to meet either of these trust indicators. The site also has limited opportunities for feedback, offering little more than a handful of email addresses to send your grievances or concerns to.
Additionally, the Silver Belt does not have a section of their site dedicated to explaining their practices or standards. While they do offer readers a lengthy privacy policy statement, they don’t have a locale for telling readers about their policies — which is concerning from a trustworthiness perspective.
Overall, I don’t think the Arizona Silver Belt should be considered a trustworthy news source. It blends questionable sponsored content with hard news without proper labeling, does not afford readers an opportunity to properly engage with or critique their work, and doesn’t provide an explanation for how they conduct their reporting or editing. I do not think this site should be used for garnering information or understanding of local issues affecting Globe or Miami.
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