Craigslist founder Craig Newmark offered up some thoughts on how to improve journalism.

From the Huffington Post (posted Oct. 19):

There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I'm excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity.

However, the tech is secondary, not nearly as important as repairing some current issues with trust and curation.

Trust is the new black, as I like to say. The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so.

News curation, that is, selecting what's news and should be visible, that's an equally big deal.

He used the way the WMD issue was covered in the leadup to the Iraq war as one major example.

He didn't have much use for objectivity, saying, in effect, it's the enemy of trust. As for the proverbial way forward ...

The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.

A major opportunity is to be found by rejecting the involvement of professional disinformation groups. New models for fairness in reporting will balance the current vision. That's probably captured in the statement that "transparency is the new objectivity."

The deal is that the future of news organizations will be determined by emergent trends which are already visible. There's a lot of challenge there, which is to say, lots of opportunity.