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And with the flick of a switch… we unveil a new design for Trust.org, home of the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s free news and services.
Regular users of Trust.org will notice a sleeker look for easier scanning of pages. They’ll see a more balanced mix of text and visual content. And, we hope, they’ll get a more intuitive sense of what Thomson Reuters Foundation is all about.
It’s been a year since we consolidated the Foundation’s family of websites onto the single Trust.org platform – a move that meant compressing a mishmash of brands into a coherent offering.
For one thing, it meant fusing our AlertNet humanitarian and climate change news services with TrustLaw, a hub of news and information on women’s rights and anti-corruption.
The goal was comprehensive coverage of the world’s under-reported stories, produced by the Foundation’s network of 27 staff journalists on five continents and more than 100 regular freelancers.
With the move to the single website, all that news now sat alongside TrustLaw Connect, our marketplace for free legal assistance, and our Trust Media programmes dedicated to supporting the highest quality independent journalism worldwide.
If all that felt a bit shoehorned together, we hope this latest makeover will serve as an elegant culmination of the consolidation.
Gone are the chunky, multicoloured filter buttons that allowed users to parse content according to legacy brands: AlertNet, AlertNet Climate, TrustLaw Women and TrustLaw Governance.
Now there’s just news, segregated by subject: humanitarian, climate, women’s rights and corruption. It’s also navigable by region – and even through pictures.
TrustLaw remains a brand in its own right, allowing our ever-expanding network of lawyers to provide free legal assistance to social enterprises and non-governmental organisations in more than 150 countries. It’s also a landing page for the many cross-border research projects and publications spearheaded by TrustLaw lawyers, such as a major study on the rights of domestic workers and a report into privacy in a mobile world.
Meanwhile, the programmes that were formerly housed under the Trust Media umbrella are now found via the site’s Excellence in Journalism tab.
This is a gateway to the Foundation’s journalism and media training courses (more than 12,000 local journalists trained at last count), as well as Aswat Masriya and The Source, our independent news services in Egypt and Zimbabwe. Users are also one click away from the Foundation-funded Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, which provides groundbreaking insight into the business of news.
Web makeovers are a bit like ice sculptures: No matter how carefully chiseled, you can always be sure things will get a little runny. No doubt future iterations will offer greater improvements as we continue to take stock of user testing and site metrics.
Until then, we hope you’ll enjoy the new interface and find it easier to get your hands on what you’re looking for. Maybe you’ll even stumble across some pleasant surprises along the way. As always, we welcome frank feedback.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
