As we all struggle to make sense of the flood of disinformation and misinformation in digital media, some entrepreneurs are developing businesses to help us identify the good stuff, the credible stuff.
At the heart of one of the three business models is transparency–full disclosure–to increase our trust of particular media. And the other two base their models on algorithms–artificial intelligence–with editorial curation to rate the trustworthiness of particular media and journalists .
NewsGuard calls itself “the internet trust tool“, because it rates the reliability and trustworthiness of thousands of online news organizations. Two of its recent articles focused on some of the most common themes of covid-19 misinformation and the persistent life of “the paid protester” hoax.
The service is free to users. A user can download Newsguard to their browser or mobile device, which uses nine criteria of credibility and transparency to give a rating to a news organization.
Any time they search for a news item or see one on social media, the user can click and see the Newsguard rating of green (trustworthy), red (untrustworthy), satire (may or may not be based on facts), or platform (it publishes user content without verifying its credibility).
NewsGuard has also offered a news literacy course to public libraries and educational institutions around the world so that their users can understand better the source of the news they are receiving.
How NewsGuard makes money
Its revenue comes from the platforms and search engines for licensing their ratings in order to include them in their feeds and search results. Newsguard says it rates more than 4,500 sites “responsible for 95% of engagement with news in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Italy”.
NewsGuard takes no revenue from the websites it rates. It explains why a site has a green or red rating, and a site with a red rating can appeal, explain, or change its practices in order to get a green rating.
Co-founders and co-CEOs are Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, both veteran journalists and news entrepreneurs. Brill founded The American Lawyer, Court TV, and the Yale Journalism Initiative. Crovitz was publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a columnist for the paper. They explains its processes in a section called Why you should trust us.
Deepnews.ai is a media and technology company that uses a proprietary algorithm to identify the best news content on various topics.
As explained in an article by the Shorenstein Center, Deepnews.ai uses “deep learning algorithms and machine learning to assess articles’ journalistic merit in real time”. Each article is assigned a score on a scale of 1 to 5, “which is meant to reflect the article’s ‘depth of reporting, expertise, investigation, analysis, ethical processes, and resources deployed by the newsroom.’ ” The machine score is then verified by human editors.
Founder Frederic Filloux, a veteran French journalist who developed the product during a fellowship at Stanford University, told the Shorenstein Center that Deepnews.ai wants to separate “commodity news” (content based on pageviews, churn, etc.) from “value-added news” (original reporting that involves balance, expertise, and innovation).
How Deepnews makes money
Filloux announced recently that the service now publishes 15 newsletters on topics that include green energy, women in tech, the gig economy, education, and economic recovery. They offer one to five monthly newsletters for 9 to 15 euros a month.
In a brief interview in February with the French website TeleObs, Filloux said that the roughly 200 fact-checking services around the world review no more than 5,000 items published a month, which represents infinitesimal fraction of everything published.
The value propostion for the Deepnews newsletters is that the algorithm sifts through millions of items and identifies “the 25 most relevant on a given subject by drawing from a pool of 600 sources, previously selected by journalists”, he told TeleObs.
Filloux observed that, currently digital advertising has the same price no matter the quality of the content that appears next to it. He hopes that a service like Deepnews, which presumes to identify the best content on a topic, will allow those publishers to earn more for producing higher quality.
Credder
A startup commercial venture called Credder has attracted investment with its model of having users and experts rate news articles for the credibility of their content. In essence, they offer reviews of articles much like users of Yelp offer reviews of hotels, restaurants, and retailers or moviegoers rate movies for Rotten Tomatoes.
The mission of Credder, like the services mentioned above, is to help users find high-quality, credible content. In Credder’s case, that means “to accelerate the news industry’s transition from a ‘click-based’ to a ‘credibility-based’ economy of news.” Their slogan is, “we can end clickbait.”
In an interview with Journalism.co.uk, co-founder and CEO Chase Palmieri said that Credder creates a track record for the credibility of a news organization and an individual journalist.
Users can add a Google Chrome plug-in from Credder and then give a credibility and quality rating to any item they happen to be reading. You can also see how other users might have rated it on Credder.
The ratings are based on ratings given by registered users and by verified accounts of professional journalists.
Journalists themselves can submit their articles for ratings by users and other journalists by inserting a snippet of code into the work they publish.
Credder’s business model
According to the venture capital website Pitchbook, Credder has raised $750,000 from three angel investors as well as support from an accelerator and a law firm.
The most detailed analysis of Credder’s value proposition, potential audience, potential revenue sources, and challenges was done by none other than Frederic Filloux, founder of Deepnews.
The startup plans to generate revenue from a tipping model much like Patreon, in which users make a monthly contribution to the authors and news outlets they prefer. They also hope to generate revenue from authors paying to have their articles pushed out to a targeted audience.
To be honest, I find Credder’s rating icons confusing. In their system, “gold” is good and “mould”, represented by green, is bad. To my eyes, gold looks like yellow. And given the international acceptance of yellow for caution and green for good or “go”, I think the ratings will confuse some users.
Three businesses help users find trustworthy information