One service that’s greatly needed today is evaluations of web sites’ credibility by entities that people trust.  

Several years ago, I came across a chart showing where various media outlets stood in terms of both their political orientation and their journalistic reliability. I found it extremely useful.  But when I searched for it again recently, I saw that it didn’t include websites—the form of media where this sort of service is now most urgently needed.

The gap could be filled by an online service in which no single organization makes all the assessments, because not all people trust the same sources.  Instead, users could choose an entity whose judgments they respected—no matter whether that was the Columbia School of Journalism or National Review. 

Readers would pay ten cents to access such a service—the same amount as for accessing any other web page.  A lot of people would presumably be willing to spend a dime to help ensure that what they’re putting into their brains isn’t actually poisoning them. Those dimes could finance the efforts of a healthy and diverse crop of website evaluators.