Study Shows Only 20% of Readers Believe the News. NewsCred Offers First News Website Focused on Credibility of Articles, Journalists and Sources

NewsCred, which launches its Public Beta today, uses the ‘wisdom of crowds’ concept to address this problem by providing a platform for news readers and journalists to voice their opinion on the credibility of news.

Geneva, Switzerland (EMWNews) August 19, 2008 — NewsCred, a company focused on helping news readers find the highest quality and most credible news online, today launched its highly-anticipated public beta.

With the explosion of news sources, blogs, citizen journalism sites and news aggregators, news readers are finding it increasingly difficult to find high quality, accurate news online. A recent US-wide study* shows that a mere 19.6% of Americans believe what they read in the news, and only 30.4% believed that the news was balanced. By applying the wisdom of crowds concept, NewsCred gives readers a platform to voice their opinion on the credibility of news, and allows the discerning news consumer to focus only on credible news content while filtering out news that is biased or inaccurate.

NewsCred’s core product is a digital newspaper that aggregates all the world’s most credible news, in one place (http://www.newscred.com). The NewsCred community then votes on the credibility of articles, journalists and news sources. NewsCred’s algorithms analyze this data, and unlike other social news sites, NewsCred uses the data to present the news based on quality, not popularity. For the first time, NewsCred provides a platform for news readers and journalists to come together and use the latest Web 2.0 technologies to help improve transparency and accountability in the news media industry.

“Every single person we’ve talked to has told us that they’ve come across articles or news content that they thought were biased or factually inaccurate. This is exactly the problem we’re trying to solve,” said Shafqat Islam, co-founder of NewsCred. “Access to credible and accurate news is a cornerstone of democracy and it’s absolutely essential that news readers can trust the news they read. At NewsCred we’re providing the transparency and accountability to ensure this trust is maintained. Giving news readers a platform to voice their opinions and building an online track record for journalists is the first step towards restoring some of the news media’s lost credibility.”

NewsCred collects and presents data on three dimensions: articles, journalists, and news sources. The credibility data that NewsCred collects is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a news source, and the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. “How trustworthy are the news sources you rely on and how credible are the journalists who are producing that news? This is ultimately the question we will help answer. It’s a question of accountability and ensuring that the journalistic principles of objectivity and accuracy are never compromised by outside interests.” said Iraj Islam, co-founder of NewsCred. “We haven’t seen this level of transparency anywhere else in the media industry, and we’re convinced it will benefit both news readers and journalists alike.”

NewsCred was recently nominated for the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer Award for 2009. The company was co-founded by Iraj Islam and Shafqat Islam and launched its private, invite-only Alpha in April 2008.

NewsCred notable features:

• First digital newspaper where mainstream news readers can easily personalize the content they read.

    

• News filtered on quality and credibility, not popularity.

    

• Content from both mainstream news sources as well as established blogs across nine vertical categories, including World, US, European, Business and Sports news.

    

• NewsCred Analytics module (http://www.newscred.com/analytics/industry) tracks credibility trends and introduces online track records for journalists, bloggers and news sources.

    

• Automatically generated NewsCred Topic pages on thousands of the most important people, events, organizations, companies and places in the news today. For example: http://www.newscred.com/beijing-olympics

    

• Semantic technology automatically makes connections between topics, and also understands the topics that are discussed in any news article.

    

• Ability to search a repository of millions of news articles and topic pages.

*For details of this study, go to http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS160770+08-Jan-2008+PRN20080108

About NewsCred

NewsCred is an international start up focused on helping news readers find the highest quality and most credible news online. NewsCred recently introduced the world’s first personalized digital newspaper that gives readers all the world’s most credible news, in one place. NewsCred aggregates news from the world’s top newspapers and most established blogs and then allows readers to vote on the credibility of articles, journalists and news sources. The company was recently nominated for the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer Award for 2009. NewsCred was founded in the summer of 2007 by Shafqat Islam and Iraj Islam and has offices in Geneva, Switzerland and Stockholm, Sweden. Iraj is a serial entrepreneur from Sweden, having previously worked on multiple consumer-web startups. Shafqat was previously a Technology Vice President for Merrill Lynch managing a Private Banking Technology team. NewsCred is completely self-funded. For more information about NewsCred, go to http://www.newscred.com.

Press Contact:

Shafqat Islam

shafqat @ newscred.com

+41 79 474 6405