Thursday 20 December 2007

Credibility and the International Herald Tribune

We're all agreed there is no shortage of news and information out there, and most of it is free.

But is it credible?

Indeed our belief in the credibility of the International Herald Tribune is probably what makes us such loyal readers, and credibility has to be one of the IHT's central brand assets.

A blog about 'News Credibility, Media 2.0 and the Social Media Revolution', NewsCred Blog, http://blog.newscred.com/?p=52 claims that "a Google Ad that was automatically served up when I looked up the definition online" and the advert was for the IHT!

I tried (twice) the reference source NewsCred Blog mentioned (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language http://www.bartleby.com/61/) and no IHT advert popped up.

Leaving this credibility gap aside, I did find NewsCred's posting interesting. They had run an on-line survey, and asked their readers to "try and define ‘Credibility’ in a few words? Go ahead, be creative."

Here is a list of "the most interesting responses, in random order" that NewsCred received:

No spin
Reliability, authenticity, gung ho?
Trustworthiness
Credibility is to remove of doubt/confusion
Facts…
Information that is believable and realistic
A time-proven reputation for accuracy and fairness
Telling the truth all the time
Whom we can trust and believe…
Is the information verifiable from other sources
Reliable, absolutely true to the facts
Facts identified as true traced to primary source
Trustworthy sources
Disposition of honesty, integrity and consistency
Something i can believe and trust
Trustworthy, objective, fact-based
The validity of facts; the actual truth
Well sourced, within a context, siteable
The foundation our beliefs are built on
News is authentic, sources well cited
The result of an honest work.
Inverse of propaganda
Something you can rely on, you can trust
Can be corroborated by multiple independent agents
Diversity of news (not just US or Euro-centric)
Calm tone/language; believability; trustworthiness
Something that is not a lie nor made up
Having a unbiased and factual quality
Reliable, Trustworthy and Honest
Trustworthy, unbiased, innovative not fictitious
The measure of how believable something is.

I think the IHT stacks up pretty well against that list, but then I am a fan.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi-Shafqat from NewsCred here. If you go to Google and do a search for ‘dictionary credibility’ and click on the first link, you will go to a website for TheFreeDictionary. Here they have definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary. On the same page, right above the definition, I can still see a Google ad for the IHT! Looks like the IHT did some savvy keyword marketing.

Glad you found the NewsCred survey interesting. Look out for the NewsCred launch sometime in the next month or two.

Shafqat