About two weeks ago, The Doodle Project (TDP) took on the stewardship of verifiedjournalist.org from the folks over at HoneyTree tech. TDP, my little small business, has two main sets of offerings:
- Family internet safety solutions, like Pihole for Home – a managed Pihole security and privacy suite, along with training, advocacy, etc.
- Fediverse solutions – we offer one of the longest running and most stable fediverse relays and a service that provides the ability for individuals and organizations to run on the fediverse with their own domain without having to run their own mastodon server.
One of the biggest challenges that we've seen these past few years is helping people migrate from the hellscape that has become Twitter (I refuse to call it X because it's stupid). In doing so, we've had lots of great success in onboarding individuals to “bring their own domain” to our ecosystem that we offer at https://ourselves.space. One group in particular that I'm fond of, is news organizations and journalists. It's ... a lot ... to migrate. It's even harder to have a sort of decentralized verification mechanism for journalists and news orgs to prove who they are. Sure, there are several news focused instances like journa.host and newsie.social. But, like many other instances, those are open – anyone can join.
Enter https://verifiedjournalist.org. I've been a fan of Jeff and team over at HoneyTree Tech and they've been phenomenal at building an ecosystem of trust. The verifiedjournalist.org site is a great site to find journalists and news orgs that have been “Accepted” as well as those that have been “Verified.” Because of our alignment in passion for helping the fediverse verify and find a home for this critical set of people and organizations, it was a great pairing when we got together to help take on the stewardship of the site.
The site will remain free, supported by donations (please!) and we'll continue to work with the team at HoneyTree Tech on future versions of the verifiedX platform which verifiedjournalist.org is based. Here's a bit about what verifiedjournalist.org does.
Any journalist or news org can have their profile added to the site. Once added, we'll list them. Easy as that. But there are further states that can add additional trust relationships within the fediverse:
Accepted means – any journalist or news org that has been added can be accepted and visible on the platform. This allows the site to pull posts from their account and roll into the ecosystem for visibility.
Verified means – once an account is accepted, the journalist or news org can claim their profile. When they claim their profile, the team at TDP will research the profile to validate the person is who they say they are. This often involves a few DMs where we ask for evidence the person is affiliated with the organization they claim. Once verified, our system places a verified badge on their profile and the end user or org can add the rel=me link to their profile which cross links to verifiedjournalist.org. This completes the verification.
verifiedjournalist.org is a great place to not just find people, but amplify the content that matters to news organizations and journalists. When claiming a profile, we obtain an OAUTH token with READ permissions to the PUBLIC data of the journalist or news org. This allows us to read the profile and public posts of the user as well as collect vital statistics which are then presented to the journalist/news org in the stats dashboard so they can see reach within the fediverse for their work. The feed is updated every minute to show newest posts from around the globe.
There's a lot of great content happening from our newsies. We hope you find the service useful for finding verified journalists and news orgs. If you'd like to support our work and help keep the service alive, you can make a monthly recurring donation of $1 to The Doodle Project here: https://subscriptions.thedoodleproject.com/subscribe/93ae02662a4e0933d2767e6de0a988d5835d327f877b7e75ad482bf477cf719e/Vjt1