Who Are These Journalists

A new site called News Transparency is trying to bring transparency to journalists by publishing basic biographical information, recent stories and social media presences.

Via Poynter:

Ira Stoll is 38. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. His phone number is (718) 499-2199 and his email is ira@futureofcapitalism.com. He went to college at Harvard, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Sun, and he considers Seth Lipsky a personal friend.

I know all this from Stoll’s profile page on NewsTransparency.com, a new site he just launched to make it easier for the public “to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas.”

The site consists of journalist profile pages which, like Wikipedia, allow anyone to add information and, like Amazon, enable ratings and reviews. They also collect articles written about the journalist’s work.

If you’re familiar with Techcrunch’s Crunchbase, the idea should be familiar: Create a publicly accessible database that lets anyone learn more about the movers and shakers in a given field.

Created by Ira Stoll, News Transparency hopes to build trust between the public and journalists. Let’s see what happens when the journalists find their digital paper trail easy to find and read.