Have you ever wondered how credible the news you are reading is? A recent study in the US shows that only 20% readers believe the news they read.
NewsCred, an international start-up by two Bangladeshi men, focuses on helping the readers find the highest quality and most credible news online.
Shafqat Islam, 27, who was born in Bangladesh but lives in Geneva, is one of the two founders of the site. He is a former project manager for financial systems at Merrill Lynch and now runs the site with his friend Iraj Islam, 24, a resident of Stockholm.
Shafqat believes all the other news aggregators are just too complicated for most users. He wanted to create something which is easy to use.
"I started NewsCred with my cofounder about a year ago in Dhaka. We both grew up abroad, but were always big news readers, and started NewsCred for two main reasons," said Islam.
"Every single person we talked to told us about their frustrations with the news media today, where they came across news articles or news sources that were not always accurate or were biased. Especially given the abundance of information online, it became increasingly difficult to find high quality news. So this was a problem we wanted to address," he said.
"We also didn't know of any news sites that were easy to customise and personalise, especially for the mainstream news audience like our families or friends. On NewsCred, it's extremely simple to set up a personalised digital newspaper of all your favourite sources. It's as simple as clicking on the logos of your favourite news sources," he mentioned.
NewsCred launched its public beta in August 2008.
NewsCred recently introduced the world's first personalised digital newspaper that gives readers all the world's most credible news, in one place (
http://www.NewsCred.com). It 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 NewsCred community then votes on the credibility of articles, journalists and news sources.
When asked about the NewsCred voting system, Shafqat said their ranking/voting system is very straightforward. Any registered user can vote to either credit or discredit an article. A user can also credit/discredit a news sources or author directly.
"Our algorithm also has a bit of intelligence, whereby it propagates a vote on an article and affects the original author of that piece and also the publication where the article appears (we call it a 'waterfall' algorithm). We think it is important that authors and sources are held accountable for the contents they produce, so it's important to tie them all together," Shafqat said.
The binary system was chosen because it's simple and provides the least barriers to entry for the user.
"Our goal is to get our readers to think in terms of credibility and quality, and we wanted to give them a very simple platform to voice their opinions. We're thinking about modifying it slightly so that discredits must be accompanied by a short explanation or tag to explain the motivation behind the discredit. This is not simply to keep people honest--we think it will help people think through the process of evaluating an article for credibility," he added.
He said it is of course a challenge to get all users to think about credibility all the time. There is no way we can 'force' people into voting purely based on quality or credibility. But we've taken steps to help, including the full transparency of their voting and also explaining discredits.
If someone's voting history is simply filled with discredit of all Microsoft articles, it will become evident. "We might put in steps to weight his vote differently, but that does not exist yet. The important part is educating our community. The voting buttons have clear explanations of what they should be looking for (i.e. "if you think this article is biased, or factually inaccurate, please discredit etc"). We will be putting more of those tips and 'user education' throughout the site."
Every single user is not an expert and can not always get it right every time. "But we do believe in the principle of wisdom of crowds: we have confidence that the aggregate knowledge of our community, and the overall results of their voting, will be meaningful and will allow us to draw interesting and valid conclusions," he said.
People have local knowledge, specialised knowledge, and may be better at determining credibility of some articles rather than others. This all plays a part and, on the whole, the founders believe that their readers are doing a great job. "Everyone will have inherent biases, but to say that newsreaders don't have the ability to put that aside and determine quality or spin in an article is doing them a disservice. We believe being a newsreader is qualification enough to voice your opinion. As a fun metaphor, I would say you don't need to be a chef or a professional food critic to be able to critique food, right?" Shafqat said.
When asked about their business model, he mentioned that it is two-fold: they plan on having targeted advertising on the NewsCred.com pages. They think, with a large user base and given the traction they are seeing, they can monetise those page views.
The second half of their business model is to take all their in-house technology and build a news platform. "We want to work with publishers to give them compelling contents for their sites via APIs. We realise that we have a lot of great technology and community-powered data, so we want to be able to share this with publishers and news sites," he said.
"NewsCred is very different from Digg and other 'social news sites' because we are a credibility-focused operation. Digg is based on popularity, and NewsCred is driven by quality," Shafqat added..
In addition, in Digg, people submit individual links and often the quality of the links are not great, and are focused on trivial issues only. However, we source our news from a list of the most credible news organisations and blogs, so our quality of content is inherently better and more relevant to the mainstream newsreader.
Shafqat said they are different from Google and Yahoo News because "we focus a lot on community, and give users a platform to voice their opinions. This option does not exist on Google and Yahoo news."
In addition, the site's customisation and personalisation is a lot simpler-- users merely click on the logos of their favourite websites and they have a fully customised, digital newspaper. This is not possible on Google and Yahoo news. "We really respect our competition, but we think we can build a compelling solution that is better than the options out there, especially for mainstream newsreaders."
Shafqat believes NewsCred will certainly encourage other Bangladeshis to try their hand at entrepreneurship and shows that Bangladeshis can be successful in the global startup.