First, let’s start with news websites and the benefits of using aggregated content. Regardless of your news focus or the size of your company, offering aggregated news content is without a doubt the most cost- and technology-efficient way to keep your readers engaged and up-to-date. It seems strange to me that large, national newspapers would have local correspondents in every small city and equally perplexing that local papers would try to write original content on international issues where they are not likely present or active. Major newspapers should therefore outsource their local news coverage in the same way that local sources should outsource their international news. By restructuring newspapers, large and small, to stick to their natural skill sets and aggregate the rest, newspapers could save a great deal of money and reallocate those resources to the areas where they provide the most value and readership. Moreover, having aggregated news content on your website can provide your inquisitive readers with additional context around a particular story or topic. With aggregated content at your disposal, even ordinary news sites with limited resources can become dynamic information hubs, while significantly boosting their traffic, user retention and the frequency of visits from regular users.

Convincing news sources to use aggregated content is an easy sell, I agree. But how about the original content creators which fuel aggregation services with content? As many of you already know, there is a lot of heated debate about whether or not news aggregators serve a positive or negative role by disseminating excerpts from other sources across the web. In my view, the expansion of news aggregators and aggregation services has been an ideal distribution campaign for a great number of major news sources and it has, in essence, created thousands of new one-way avenues to access their original content. And the best part of it for content providers is that this wide-reaching marketing and distribution service is completely free of charge!

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Admittedly, I find myself spending less and less time these days flipping through Facebook’s numerous pages. In part, the gimmick of poking friends and throwing zombies at girls I had crushes on in elementary school has worn off. But also, I am still recovering from the recent fiasco surrounding FB’s Terms of Service. You see, like 98% of all internet users, I simply don’t have the time (nor the desire) to read through every licensing agreement or terms of reference thrown at me when registering for a new service or downloading a new application. Not only is the wording always super dry and legal, but it is also made deliberately long and in the smallest font available so that even the bravest and most protective of users (the other 2%) eventually cave in about half way through, scroll down and click “I agree”.

Anyway, all this to say that it took me close to five years to realize that I had effectively sold off my first born child to Facebook and had handed over full rights to use and distribute all of my personal information, photos, videos etc. Quite frankly, I don’t think that the details of my personal life are exciting enough to be of any real value, with the possible exception of marketing firms looking to send me targeted ads. But that’s besides the point! The real danger is that we are all being tactfully swindled out of our privacy without fully realizing the potential long-term implications at the time of registering, whether it be on FB or other social networking sites.

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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.

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…

“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.

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

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

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… (more…)

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.