NewsCred Blog

By now, most of you have probably heard about MashLogic, the company whose tagline “Take Back the Web” says it all. They are all about democratizing the web, and returning the power of the hyperlink to the user. How do they do this? They have an awesome browser add-on extension (Firefox and IE) that scans web pages and adds link to interesting topics. The real power is that you, the user, tells the add-on extension what you’re interested in and from what source, and they present you with that information. Techcrunch described it as a “Swiss Army knife of the web.” As someone using Mashlogic for the past few months, I couldn’t agree more.

I’m thrilled to announce the NewsCred partnership with MashLogic. They’ve used our upcoming API to build a ‘mash’ that will expand on our vision of providing our readers with “all the world’s credible news in one place.” With the NewsCred Mash, you can get “all the world’s credible news in one place, whereever you are.” On any page on any site, you’ll see relevant topics appear with a blue underline, and hovering over will give you a snippet of NewsCred’s topic pages: credible articles, pictures, related topics and more.

I encourage you all to give it a try by downloading the NewsCred edition of MashLogic here: http://mashlogic.com/brands/newscred. It only takes a few seconds, but be sure to explore some of the other mashes that you can add onto the same extension (I highly recommend the Wikipedia one).

Congratulations to Ranjit and the MashLogic team for a fantastic product. The new social web is all about taking the power and putting it back in the hands of the consumer.  They’ve done just that. Look out for some of the exciting products NewsCred is launching next month for more examples of empowering individuals - we’re hoping to turn some heads.

Everyone seems to be raving about Twitter these days. It’s user base is growing at unprecedented speeds and there are many claims that it is rapidly changing the way in which we receive and transmit information. While Twitter and other social media sites are giving an important platform to voice opinions and exchange ideas, it is also raising important questions about the quality and credibility of mass information flows.

In the last few days, there has been much debate about the role of Twitter in covering the post-election demonstrations in Iran. In a country that has deliberately and forcefully shut the door to international media coverage, Twitter and other specialized blog sites now seem to be the only sources of first hand information leaving the country. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that “the [Iranian] government revoked press credentials for foreign journalists and ordered journalists not to report from the streets”. What’s worse is the threat from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, earlier today, to punish any citizens caught using online media tools to communicate with each other or sending news, opinion pieces or images of the situation abroad.

While major news sources are prevented from reporting on the tensions in Tehran, Twitter has quickly filled this information void and has become a pivotal source of first hand news coverage in the last few days. On the one hand, we should be grateful that there are still a few avenues of information leaking from the front lines. However, we should also be conscious of the journalistic dangers of depending solely on the tweets and blog posts of inexperienced, and oftentimes politically biased, citizens on the ground. In the last 48 hours alone, the internet has been flooded with misinformation about the political turmoil in Iran. I have personally read widely differing accounts on the number of protesters and casualties at demonstrations, the percentage of fraudulent votes, the personal damage inflicted in university dorms etc…

Like many other online news readers, one of my major concerns is the fact that the news being produced on the ground and spread on the web is unverifiable. Balanced accounts of the situation are spreading just as quickly as unsubstantiated rumors and there is simply no way to filter these news reports for accuracy. While major news sources are pressured into some degree of due diligence and fact checking before publishing information, citizen journalists are not held accountable for their contributions.

The main challenge that we face today is how to assess the credibility of independent journalists, particularly in situations where governments have clamped down on freedom of the press. If we cannot find a way to verify citizen reports for factual accuracy, or provide some independent assessments of the quality of news they are disseminating, then the risk is that all citizen reporting from the field will be discredited simply by virtue of it being written by ordinary citizens.

We at NewsCred are very conscious of this significant challenge and are deeply concerned with finding a solution to the issue of media credibility, whether the news is produced from major mainstream sources or independent citizens in the streets. If you share our concerns or have any ideas on how to confront and address these issues, please share your thoughts with us. Together, we can make a difference…

This is hilarious, and quite poignant:

Google has been the subject of many attacks from big media companies (WSJ, News Corp, A.P. etc) about their use of news content on Google News and their core search engine. One of the criticisms is that Google News does not give any extra weight or importance to the so-called ‘big, established media brands’ such as the Wall Street Journal. For example, a search on Google news for ‘Gaza Attack’ may result in smaller newspapers or even established blogs being given priority over the large news organizations. Some of these larger news source often has staff, offices and substantial costs associated with reporting from such a conflict area, hence their displeasure with the Google News algorithm. Google never flinched: they maintained that their algorithsm unearthed the most relevant news, from publishers large and small, from around the world.

“Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper Web sites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month. These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international, day and night,” wrote Alexander Macgillivray in a Tuesday post to Google’s Public Policy Blog.

But has something changed? There was a Google News outage on Monday May 18th for nearly two hours.  Did they finally give in to the large organizations and put in artificial weighting for large sources? While I cannot confirm, it certainly appears so.

A look at the Google News homepage shows a dramatically different set of sources than the ones we’ve become accustomed to. In fact, as I write this post, every single news cluster is led by an article from the largest publishers. The two or three subsquent articles are also from large media organizations. What happened to the diversity? What happened to the international sources? What happened to “large and small”?

Here’s a screenshot as of right now. Notice, the sources present are the likes of Bloomberg, ABC News, Reuters, Assocaited Press, CNN, Newsweek etc. In fact, I can’t find a single small publisher or international (non-UK, non-US) source with the exception of Al-Jazeera.

This is all speculation at this point. I’m sending an email to Google for comment, but doubt I’ll get a meaningfull response. It’s clear that something has change. I just hope they haven’t capitulated to the demands of big media. While they need all the help they can get, but artificially inflating their place in the results is not the way to go.

This video is about when you have nothing, and then making it into something.

Not much else to say here except please watch this aweesome video! A great production from the guys and gals at Grasshopper.com.

I am not usually the type to gloat or seek out the proverbial pat-on-the-back but a few days ago I received a message that validates all of the hard work that we’ve been pouring into NewsCred.

I’ll keep this member anonymous but would just like to share a few of their encouraging words with the rest of you: “Dear Alex, I can’t begin to express to you how happy I am for NewsCred. It’s like a “news” banquet. All of it right there. I really do find NewsCred a fantastic resource… and NewsCred has pushed my writing ahead by light years.”

It probably took this user no more than a couple of minutes to type out this thoughtful message but it has been a massive source of personal motivation all week. All this to say that your comments and input are more than just welcome, they are hugely desired and extremely valued. Whether you have something positive to say about NewsCred or would like to share some constructive criticism, please do send me your thoughts at alex at newscred dot com. We are always striving to improve and it is in large part through the continual feedback from our growing community of members that we can all work together to take NewsCred to the next level!

Thanks a bunch for the support and encouragement.

Signing off,

Alex

Having been slightly out of the media loop for the better part of the last five years, it came as quite a shock when I joined NewsCred last month and realized just how much the media landscape has changed since my journalism days in the early 2000s.

Although I too have embraced the internet for almost all of my daily news, I still remember fondly the “good ol’ days” of print media. You see, I had a paper route as a kid and can recall devouring the comics section of my local newspaper every morning with my bowl of cheerios! Even my pops, who was far from being a news junkie, used to skim through the paper with his morning coffee. But today, with more and more people glued to computer screens, and for longer hours, the web is rapidly replacing newspapers as the easiest, quickest and cheapest source of mass news consumption.

However, the dramatic collapse of the newspaper industry need not be so agonizing and depressing. Surely, most people will agree that having greater and faster access to information is a good thing. The internet has given you, me and the average Joe the power to stay connected with people, places and events from around the globe and all in real-time. In real-time! I’d like to take a moment to dwell on this issue of “real-time” news delivery as it is all-too-often overlooked in the heated debates on the future of mainstream newspapers. Quite simply, many of us have become accustomed to instant information. Good or bad, that’s the way it is. When a suicide bomber detonates 35 kilos of explosives in a crowded Baghdad market, I want to know about it five minutes later, not the next day. By the time most newspapers go to print, the information they publish is already old news! And that is only one of the reasons why the online news space is quickly replacing traditional print media.

No one will deny that we are experiencing a cataclysmic shift in both information delivery and intake. Newspapers realize it. And so do news consumers. The fact that news is so readily accessible, abundant and available free of charge is an incredible step in the socio-political advancement of many societies. The media playing field has changed dramatically in a matter of decades and traditional newspapers are struggling to stay in the game. Many are faced with great challenges and are asking themselves how to remain competitive in such a rapidly changing information age. I have an answer… Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has an article on the free versus paid debate for news. While the article is good, it seems like the most important elements of the discussion boil down to two sentences. Feel free to read the full article, or just get my summary below.

1) Content: “The question now is whether that common denominator approach can work online,” Mr. Honack said. He says he thinks it will require treating the audience and the products as a series of niches, and tailoring the offering to the customer. “You have to find out what part of your product you can get them to come back for.”

2) Features: “With newspapers and magazines, there have to be features you can’t get anywhere else, and maybe part of what you would pay for is the privilege of helping the business survive, but that is more of a difficult sell.”

That’s really all it comes down to. The reason why people won’t pay for news today is because neither of those two criteria are being met.

In terms of content, most newspapers have a one-size-fits-all online edition, and there is no personalization or tailoring of news to fit my needs and wants. With that said, the only newspapers that are able to charge online today are the ones who serve niches (i.e. WSJ charges for exclusive, high quality financial news aimed at corporate management. I can guarantee if a common denomintor offering like a broad national newspaper (i.e. USA Today) tried to charge for content, those 20 million readers would go elsewhere in a heartbeat.

In terms of features, newspaper sites are so generic that there are hardly and features that I can’t get elsewhere. If there is significant feature innovation, there is a chance the readers may pay up. ProPublica overs a subscription service that allows readers to have dialogues with reporters - while it hasn’t been overwhelmingly successful, that kind of innovation will help it differentiate itself from the run-of-the-mill news site. Others can innovate around technology, customization, user interface, news delivery - heck, some users may even pay for a site that isn’t painfully slow!

Will people pay for news online? Only if there is a reason to pay - either content or features they can’t get elsewhere. It’s supply and demand economics 101.

In what can only be seen as great news amongst all the doom and gloom for newspapers recently, it seems like newspapers are having the opposite problem to the one we expected: they are getting way too much traffic. So much traffic in fact, that many newspapers are calling out and asking for help from search engines and news aggregators. Organizations such as News Corp and the Associated Press are asking for search engines to stop indexing their content so as not to send them any more free traffic. The ones that are especially inundated by traffic (i.e WSJ) are also asking news aggregators to stop linking to them and imploring them to reduce the traffic sent. By not linking, newspapers can also ensure that their Google PageRanks don’t get any higher since the consequences are severe: even more traffic than they can handle.

In a surprising move, even the Guardian Media Group, an organization that normally enjoys and appreciates incoming traffic is asking for the government to review the role of news aggregators like Google News.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to guage the severity of the “traffic abundance” problem and see how Google and other news aggregators can come to the newspaper’s rescue. With some help from Robin Goad at the Hitwise Blog, I was able to get some statistics to shed some more light here. Although this data is based on UK data, I’m fairly sure it is representative of the wider world as well (in either case, let’s assume some margin of error).

According to the statistics, newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them traffic.  If they ask Facebook and Yahoo to stop linking, they can reduce by a further 4.69%. If they really want to reduce traffic even further, they can shut down all news aggregators and that should comfortably reduce their traffic by around 40%. That will leave them with 60% of the current traffic, which I imagine should satisfy their current needs.

Jeff Jarvis, who knows a thing or two about the news business says “Google is far and away the most productive means of sending audience to news sites.” (OK, so he said that two years ago, but he’s ahead of the pack). As such, it is no surprise that newspapers are turning to Google immediately to help solve their current traffic overload problems.

Finally, Jay Rosen also has a great post about this exact same issue, also from two years ago. It seems like these traffic spurts come in cycles, and we’re in the middle of a veritable plague of traffic and readers. The only way to escape this plague is to shut down the aggregators, turn off Google, turn away atleast 40% of your readers and wait for it to pass.

Hello friends and fellow bloggers,

It’s a real pleasure to be making my digital debut and to be posting my first (of many) blog posts. For those of you who missed my warm welcome a few weeks back, I’m Alex Sabbag, NewsCred’s new Marketing and Community Manager.

In addition to posting comments, making occasional wise-ass remarks and provoking lively discussions, my new role at NewsCred also involves keeping you happy, inspired and engaged!

You’ll be happy to note that while others have been indulging themselves over the last ten days at SXSW, eating bourbon soaked cheerios for breakfast, we’ve been slaving away in preparation for our big launch of the next version of the NewsCred website. These are indeed exciting times for NewsCred and we are super excited to be sharing them with you and want you to be as involved as possible both in this process and our success! Although a great deal of creative genius and hard work has been poured into this exciting undertaking, we are acting on the collective will of just a few (albeit highly intelligent) brains. As such, we would love to hear your suggestions, ideas and feedback on how to improve both our blog and the NewsCred website. Together, I am convinced that we can make our blog and website as amazing as they deserve to be!

In short, your contributions are our lifeblood. It’s what validates our mission, above and beyond providing an open forum to discussing the accuracy of news. Through your active involvement, our goal is to gain traction as a news ranking site and to ultimately send a clear and important message to all news sources, big and small, that media credibility is of fundamental importance to us… you, me and other newsreaders from around the globe. News credibility is crucial in today’s highly-interactive and instant information age and is pivotal to the healthy functioning of any democratic society. This is our objective. It’s a tall order, I agree, but the journey to a free, transparent and accountable press must start with one step… with one website.

I promised myself I was going to wait until my second post before proselytizing the importance of media credibility but hey, what’s done is done. I sometimes have difficulty holding back. Anyway, I look forward to hearing from, debating and working with many of you soon.

I plan on posting some more interesting and thought-provoking material in the not-too-distant future but, in the meantime, I can always be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/alex_newscred. Also, feel free to drop me a line at alex at newscred dot com and to share any ideas that you have for our burgeoning startup.

More to come soon,

Alex