Our Story

What is NewsCred?

NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you all the world's credible news in one place. We aggregrate news from hundreds of mainstream media sources, as well as established blogs, and let our users personalize their digital newspaper within seconds, without any fuss. Our community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources, and we apply our CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from the sources you love.

Who's Behind NewsCred?

NewsCred was co-founded by Iraj and Shafqat in summer 2007.

Iraj is a serial entrepreneur from Sweden having worked on multiple technology startups. He was ranked #3 in "Sweden's Top 25 Entrepreneurs 2006" by IT-magazine Internetworld. He's one of the lucky few who found his life's calling at the age of 14 - building beautiful web apps that kick ass. When he's not obsessing about the hottest open-source technologies he loves watching FC Barcelona draw triangles on a football pitch.

Shafqat went the mainstream route. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering and B.A. in Economics and was a VP of technology on Wall Street. He soon realized that titles were meaningless because you could neither eat them, nor trade them in for cash. So he decided to follow his life's passion and dive head-first into the entrepreneureal world.

Both of them are avid news readers and are passionate about new media and the changing face of journalism.

When was NewsCred founded?

The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between the two founders during the summer of 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland. Over a year later, we did not see any real movement or innovation to improve the media landscape, and we felt it was our time to start what we refer to as the 'Social Media Revolution.'

What is the Social Media Revolution?

The Social Media Revolution is what NewsCred is all about. We feel passionate about using the power of the web to restore credibility in news media. With all the news sources, mashups, blogs and aggregators available today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between real vetted news and biased, unfactual or untenable news. NewsCred will harness the power of our community and the social web to allow the discerning news consumer to focus only on credible news content while filtering out the noise. At the same time, NewsCred is a tool that will make the news experience more relevant to our personal tastes. To us, this is a revolutionary new way of accessing high quality, credible news content.

How is this different from Digg?

We love Digg and other social ranking sites, but NewsCred is completely different. We are using technology and the ratings from our user community to select the most credible articles. NewsCred selects quality, while Digg presents popularity. This is a fundamental difference in our approach, and we feel this difference is what will change the way we access news content forever.

We're taking content from traditional, mainstream new sources, combining them with established blogs, and selecting only the highest quality articles that are relevant to you. We're throwing in some real innovation to make the selection and filtering process the easiest you'll see on the web, and fun too.

Credibility. Sounds serious…

Restoring media credibility may sound like a very bold goal. However, we firmly believe that trust and credibility in media are cornerstones of a democratic society. This project is a lot bigger than the founders, or our team, or our company. We are trying to change the way millions of users access the news and obtain information about the world they live in. Of course, we want reading and discussing the news to be an enjoyable experience as well.

Is this a real problem?

We have no doubt that the problem that we are trying to solve is real. We firmly believe that a transparent and credible media industry is vital to the health of the world democracy. We've also done our research, and there are hundreds of surveys and papers that show that the public continues to fault news organizations (both traditional and online) for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes.

Does NewsCred have any political leaning?

The most fundamental decision we took when we started NewsCred was that it would never take a political stance or pass value judgments on the news we present. We support democracy, but above all, we support transparency. In fact, the NewsCred team is quite politically diverse, so if anything, it helps us with internal checks and balances.

Is NewsCred a Citizen Journalism Site?

No. While we think the citizen journalism movement is very important, NewsCred focuses on news content produced and distributed by mainstream press and high quality blogs. We firmly believe that the mainstream press can co-exist with news coming out of the blogosphere. However, in order to provide the most credible, factual and relevant news to our community, we focus on articles that have been produced by professional journalists and established bloggers.

How do you draw the line between professionals and amateurs?

We know there is a fine line between professionals and 'amateurs', especially when it comes to the blogosphere. We spend a great deal of time searching for great news articles from thousands of different sources on the web and then allow the NewsCred community to determine their credibility and newsworthiness. We always accept suggestions to expand and add to our list of news sources and will never turn away any newly submitted source. As a starting point, we take circulation seriously. To us, this metric demonstrates votes of confidence by readers. Our community will always determine who is producing the best, and most accurate news content. We can't always get it right, but we trust that the NewsCred community can.

What is your target audience?

NewsCred was created with a vision to democratize the news for millions of new readers around the world. We hope to reach the mainstream news audience – that means everyone from college graduates, professionals, our parents, and even our kids.

What will you do with all this data?

This is the crux of why we built NewsCred. We believe that the credibility data we collect is an essential metric for measuring the quality of a new source, or the journalistic credibility and integrity of its writers. Furthermore, by publishing this data, we can hold the news media industry accountable for providing its readers with the highest quality content. Finally, NewsCred will be the first public database of journalists, along with their profiles, history of articles, comments, and credibility track records.