What If We Had a Nutrition Label for the News?

Alisa Miller's TED Talk brilliantly illustrates what news industry observers have been warning for years: Our news diet is distorted.

We get very little news about places outside the United States, and that amount dwindles further when we remove Iraq from the equation. If you look at our supply of news from places outside the United States that the U.S. is not directly involved in, the effect is even more pronounced. Miller points out that demand for international news has actually increased in recent years. It's beyond clear that in this global era, we need to know what's happening elsewhere. But we're also living in an age where we're overwhelmed daily by the amount of information and content seeking our attention. The thought of measuring what we consume probably feels like too heavy a burden to all but the most intrepid a graduate student, just as tracking our daily physical activity was little to no fun before personal metric tools like NikePlus and FitBit came to market.

This task cannot be left to the individual. So, the Center for Civic Media, under the leadership of Ethan Zuckerman, is embarking on a project to build the tools to empower the individual, and the news providers themselves, to see at a glance what they're getting and what they're missing in their daily consumption.