Social Media Platform Newscred Launches

This week, social news platform Newscred officially launched, with the promise of democratizing the media and restoring the credibility of the industry in general. Co-founder Shafqat Islam is a good friend of mine and I’m pleased to see that the startup has been able to grow quickly whilst receiving considerable press exposure.

Newscred has two main purposes: 1. Act as a mainstream news aggregator, or digital newspaper. 2. Act as a platform for ranking the credibility of news sources, articles and journalists. There is a clear synergy between the two as the customizable ’digital newspaper’ format makes use of the community’s feedback by showing the most credible, or freshest, stories higher. 

One of the main criticisms of Newscred is the binary choice available to users when they decide to rate the credibility of an article – do they credit or discredit. In an ideal world, a site like this would gather the written opinion of the whole user community, then provide a summary of the audience’s opinion of a particular news article. The trouble with this is that a) it’s difficult to encourage mainstream and casual readers to supply written feedback on articles b) it’s difficult to analyze such information and provide meaningful feedback. 

When voting for political parties we settle for a binary option of which party to give our support to. It’s either yes or no. During an election we are not able to provide responses such as “I agree with this parties stance on … but not on…” or “I agree with the party ideals but would prefer a different leader “. Of course, this type of debate takes place, but the end result is a vote for, or against. Although this type of voting doesn’t allow individuals to express their in-depth opinions, it does ensure that everyone is heard equally and that as much of the population has contributed to the result as possible.

The whole point of sites like Newscred is that they attempt to mirror the opinion of ‘The People’, just like a democratic election. The real power behind the binary ranking method will emerge once the site reaches a critical mass of users; imagine during a major conflict, the ability of the masses to choose which sources, stories and journalists are providing the most accurate coverage. This mass feedback from the community is precious and will create market efficiency by broadcasting which news sources are leading in terms of reporting quality. By rewarding the world’s most credible news sources with increased exposure, let’s hope that Newscred and their community can raise the quality of reporting in the media industry for the benefit of all of us.

~ by Alex on August 24, 2008.