Dear Brian,

It was great to speak with you yesterday - I'm glad that we got along so well, and that you are interested in working together!

Thank you so much for moving so swiftly to contact your community about a possible collaboration between NewsTrust and Wikinews.

We will discuss this idea in our editorial meeting on Monday. We really appreciate your commitment to factual reporting from a neutral perspective, and it appears that we have many shared values in common. 

We are also honored that you are willing to consider using NewsTrust as a possible tool for judging the entries of participants in your upcoming writing contest (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010). We will discuss the idea of cross-promoting this contest on both of our sites at the end of January and perhaps again in early or mid-April. A good way to do this might be to use our News Hunt format at that time, if you all find the idea interesting. Read more about our News Hunts below, as well as the attached PDF with more details about NewsTrust.

I am also delighted that you were able to install our NT review buttons so quickly on the Wikimedia article pages. Thanks, bawolff, nicely done! See my response to your comment below.

At your request, we already corrected the misspelling of your name on our source profile page for Wikinews:
http://newstrust.net/sources/wikinews

Note that is is now possible for you to add one of our source widgets on your site, listing stories for review from Wikinews:
http://newstrust.net/widgets?url=/sources/wikinews/for_review

You can customize your widget in many different ways on that page (be sure to click on 'More Options') and we have many topic widgets you might consider putting next to articles that would benefit from more related stories on the same topic.

We've also started to review a couple of your featured stories, which we encourage you to review as well:

http://newstrust.net/stories/506880/toolbar?go=review

http://newstrust.net/stories/507108/toolbar?go=review

(if you are a co-author of any of these articles, or have any serious conflicts of interest, please check the appropriate box in the 'About You' section of our review form, as Brian was kind enough to do for one of the articles he co-wrote)

Lastly, I also started a Smart Feed for Wikinews here, using your feedburner RSS feed:
http://newstrust.net/feeds/180/show

This will make it easier for any of us to submit some of your upcoming stories from your feedburner feed, since much of your metada is automatically pulled from your feed. However, I encourage you to focus on posting some of your best stories, so we don't flood our review pipeline with too many stories from Wikinews right away. 

We are in the middle of a News Hunt on Climate Change, which will keep us busy through the weekend, and I have to prepare for a board meeting at the end of the week, so I will not be able to review any more stories from you guys until the following week. Thanks for your understanding. But if you have any good articles about Social Change, we would be happy to have our community review them, as that will be one of our major themes next week.

I would also like to introduce our associate editor Kaizar Campwala, who is our point person for News Hunts and partnerships. Kaizar can be reached at <kaizar@newstrust.net> and can answer any other questions you might have about using our service.

Look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks.

All the best,


Fabrice


P.S.: Do you guys know how we could encourage a Wikipedia writer to write an entry about NewsTrust on their site?

We understand and respect Wikipedia's rules against writing entries about yourself -- or asking your friends to do it -- so we have not made any attempts to have an entry written about us to date. 

But we do think that it would be reasonable for someone to write one, given all that we have contributed to this field over the years (see attached project overview).

Would you be willing to nudge an experienced Wikipedia writer interested in this topic to consider us as a worthy subject for an article?