Continuing its effort to guide searchers toward credible content, Google has announced plans to introduce eight new trust indicators.
Google’s first step toward labeling news stories came last year when the Fact Check tag was introduced.
Most recently, Google has added publisher Knowledge Panels to better educate searchers about the sources they’re getting news from.
Google’s next step will be to introduce eight additional trust indicators with assistance from the Trust Project.
The forthcoming trust indicators are designed to help readers identify credible journalism from less-trustworthy content—such as promotional material or misleading information.
Information provided by the trust indicators will also let readers know what type of story they’re about to read, who wrote it, and how the content was put together.
In order to accomplish this effort, the Trust Project is working with over 75 news organizations from around the world.
Here is a look at the eight trust indicators:
- Best Practices: Who funds the news outlet, their mission, and their commitments to ethics, diverse voices, accuracy, making corrections, and other standards.
- Author Expertise: Details about the journalist.
- Type of Work: Labels to distinguish opinion, analysis, and advertiser (or sponsored) content from news reports.
- Citations and References: Access to the sources behind the facts and assertions in a news story.
- Methods: Process and motivation behind pursuing the story.
- Locally Sourced: Lets people know that the story has local roots, origin, or expertise.
- Diverse Voices: A newsroom’s efforts to bring in diverse perspectives.
- Actionable Feedback: A newsroom’s efforts to engage the public in setting coverage priorities, contributing to the reporting process, and ensuring accuracy.
These indicators are not yet ready to be displayed alongside articles that appear in Google News and Search, but the search giant confirms it is being worked on.
In the meantime, conscientious news publishers can embed relevant markup into the HTML code of their articles. That’s one way to ensure you’ll be ready when the indicators do roll out. The new trust indicators will work like the markup used for fact-checked articles.
