“Father of the web” Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore have been awarded $350,000 from the Knight News Challenge find for their Media Standards Project, a scheme to foster more fairness and accuracy in online news. The project believes the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news and is proposing a system of “source tagging”, by which reports would add metadata to indicate, for example, whether a story was based on personal observations or original interviews. Filters would then allow readers to sort stories based on such credentials.

Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.  The project already has funding from a long list of benevolent organisations. The News Challenge is giving up to $25 million over five years to innovative news projects.