Newsonomics: As News Guard Gets Funded, Will An Ad Play Lead It To Success?
The latest Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz startup (which I described in detail last fall) takes an easy-to-understand traffic light approach to combatting the scourge of fake news. Its promised green/yellow/red signals seem like they should be brain-dead simple for even the least brand-aware of news readers to discern fact from fiction.
Now the dynamic Internet duo (who built and sold — twice — their Press+ paywall tech company) have secured the $6 million in funding they wanted. Most notable about the announcemen is the lead funder: Paris-based Publicis Groupe, one of the biggest ad buyers in the world.
Why did Publicis participate? In two words, brand safety. Digital advertisers have grown increasingly leery of finding their brands alongside hateful, deceitful, and incendiary material. A NewsGuard-like system could help ad placers stay away from the dark sides of the web.
But consider one other possible scenario. What if ad-serving platforms — including those of Google and Facebook — incorporated such signaling into their own tech? They could offer brand-safety assurance — and maybe even add a tiny surcharge for it. Of course, such a signaling might also cut off their ad serving business on the no-goodnik “red sites” — but they’re saying they want to be good citizens, right?
First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab on March 9, 2018 as part of “Newsonomics: Tronc “Crashes”, DFM Owner Sued, News Guard Funded, Advance Tiptoes Into Paywalls — and The Big Lesson From Hypergrowing The Athletic”
Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor
“Publicis is a dream lead investor,” Brill says, but keep that thought of platform use in mind as NewsGuard aims to get traction and launch later this year. The startup, of course, craves that standard of digital success: ubiquity. The first step in that is getting a major platform to adopt its rating system, and apply it. That would mean Facebook deploying it on its publisher content and Google on its publisher search and mobile presentation offerings.
That’s the big win: getting both of them to adopt. Unless at least one of those two do, though, it may well fail in its anti-fake news mission. Might Microsoft’s Bing, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or YouTube be a first adopter? Would it be enough?
With its funding announcement, NewsGuard also announced that the versatile Jim Warren, who just finished a good run with a daily Poynter news industry column, will head the presumably green eye-shaded digital news checking crew. That group could grow to 50, as NewsGuard aims to signalize and write a “nutrition-label” is-this-site trustworthy précis on the top 7,500 or so news sites in the U.S. Eric Effron, last at Reuters, will serve as managing editor.
The redoubtable Warren and artificial intelligence? NewsGuard should be interesting to watch.
Takeaway: NewsGuard could be a simple, elegant solution to both the honest hand-wringing and the overwrought blather about fake news. But we still have to ask the question that NewsGuard won’t answer until it has to: What color is Fox News? Wait for the next NewsGuard announcement. Can it get either Facebook or Google to sign on, or work its way upwards with a next-level player?
