How NewsCred Works

NewsCred brings you all the world's most credible news in one place.

Think of NewsCred as a customizable digital newspaper, where you can easily filter and access your preferred news sources, whether it's mainstream media or news content from established blogs.

How did you choose the news sources?

Simple. We decided early on that NewsCred would be a digital tapestry of news, aggregated from both mainstream news organizations as well as established blogs. So here's the recipe:

3 Tbsp - We took the 100 biggest newspapers by circulation worldwide and extracted all the English language ones.

1 Tpsp - We then took the top 50 US newspapers.

2 Cups - We combined that list with the top 100 blogs ranked by Technorati.

1 Sprinkle - We then mixed in some recommendations from friends, family, bloggers and the NewsCred blog community.

We feel like we have a great mix of sources to get going for our Private Alpha, and we will obviously be expanding that list as the site grows. If your favorite sources are missing, we'd love to add it to the recipe. Just drop us a line and tell us why you love their news, and we'll do our best to add it as soon as we can.

Personalization

Now for the fun part. You probably already read the news online, and over time have built up habits and preferences. NewsCred allows you to customize your digital newspaper into a beautiful mosaic of these preferences. Personalizing is as simple as clicking on the logos of your favorite sources - no RSS, no fuss. Don't forget that your personalization can be granular - for example, you can select certain sources for Business, but different sources for World news. Deceptively simple.

Of course, every time you log in, we'll remember your preferences and instantly present you with only the news you want from the sources you love.

NewsCred Rankings

Every article, author and news source on NewsCred has its own CredRank between 1-100, with 100 being the highest. Every time you vote on an article, we use that data to enhance our credibility metrics, not just for that article, but we also propagate that rating to the author who wrote it, as well as the news source where it appeared. We call this our credibility waterfall algorithm and that means we're constantly updating and enhancing our CredRanks for all our articles, authors and sources. A CredRank is dynamic, and we'll soon be tracking and presenting these movements over time in our upcoming NewsCred Analytics Module.

Every page, every screen, and every list on NewsCred is based upon these NewsCred rankings. We apply our sorting and ordering algorithms to these rankings in order to deliver the most credible and highest quality content to our readers, but at the same time ensure that the news is fresh, relevant and delivered instantly.

Of course, it also helps us improve our understanding of your preferences so that we can apply intelligence in the future when presenting customized news for you.

On any of the main category pages, you will see a 'CREDIBLE' or 'NOT CREDIBLE' indicator next to each article. This is simply to give you a quick indicator as you scroll through a list of articles before deciding which one to click. Clicking on the article will give you more details of the CredRank, including a breakdown of all votes cast so far.

Voting

NewsCred is a democracy, so every single vote carries the same weight.

We thought long and hard about our voting methodology and decided to make it as simple as possible on the user side. Every vote is a straightforward 'Credit' or 'Discredit', based on factors such as credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. We urge our community to think in these terms when casting their votes, which will then dynamically affect the CredRank of that article. All of this is completely transparent - as soon as you vote, you will see the CredRank of the article change instantly, as well as dynamic updates to the CredRanks of the relevant author and news source. Of course, you can directly cast your ballot for an author or a news source by going to the relevant profile page.

Did you just say Credibility Waterfall Algorithm?

Yes, we certainly did. This is just a fancy way of saying that a vote for an article propagates and has an impact on the CredRank of the author, which in turn has an impact on the CredRank of the news source. Its a simple concept, but we think this is a powerful methadology to objectively capture crediblity ratings over time. By empirically measuring credibility on the three levels, we ensure that we can present only the highest quality news articles.

Who determines if an article is Credible or Not Credible?

You do! At NewsCred, we truly believe in the idea of democratizing the news by replacing human editors by the community of newsreaders. Every vote affects the CredRank of an article, author and source. In turn, the CredRank determines the credibility level and the mapping is quite transparent. For articles, a CredRank above 50 is 'Credible' while any rating below 50 shows up as 'Not Credible.' For authors and sources, the mapping is not quite so black and white. We've mapped out the shades of gray here.

But can any reader know if an article, author or news source is credible?

We agree that not everyone can know if every article is credible or not. We don't expect that. However, we truly believe that being a newsreader is qualification enough to voice your opinion. And if enough members of our community take the time to participate and vote, we can get it right. We have an extremely diverse, independent and intelligent community. That means that some people might know more about certain topics than others. Some users may have local knowledge, while others may be working in a certain industry, or some may generally follow certain news genres more than others. If you have an opinion about the quality or credibility of an article, we encourage you to cast your vote. If you aren't sure, then there's no pressure! While we encourage our community to take this seriously, you certainly don't need to be an expert or a professional journalist to make an informed decision.

What are Topics and how do Topic pages work?

Topics are events, people, organizations, companies and places shaping the news. The most important topics of the day and their associated images are highlighted across the top of each page. Within each category (World, US, Technology etc), you will see the related topics creating the news today. Clicking on any of these topics takes you to the Topic Profile page, where you can read the latest articles, watch the videos, look at pictures and catch up on the latest Twitter buzz. In addition, we'll tell you which journalists/bloggers and news sources are talking about the topic. All our topic pages are generated automatically and updated in real time.

How do you make connections between topics?

We use semantic technology (co-occurrence) to determine connections between topics. By understanding how topics are related, we can determine the connections that are most important. When you do a search for a topic, we'll also show you topics that are connected to the one you search for!