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

Part of this initiative includes developing a tool for making online news more transparent. This tool is called news credit.

news credit uses microformats with some specific enhancements to allow journalists, and those producing journalism, to embed basic information to their news articles online which can help the public establish an article’s authorship and provenance. This information is not pejorative or judgmental, 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
• Who it was written for
• Whether it was edited (and who by)
• When it was first published
• How it has changed since publication
• When it was last updated
• What key subjects it is about
• What journalistic codes of practices (if any) it adheres to

News Credit has been developed to be as simple, usable, and extensible as possible and builds on pre-existing microformats such as hCard and hAtom.

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.