NewsCred founder Shafqat Islam and interactive news gathering

Newscred seems a feasible idea - crossing Digg with Google news/reader - but will it extend beyond the MSM and famous blogs, and what wider questions does it ask?

Paul Bradshaw at the Online Journalism Blog has an interview with Shafqat Islam, who has co-founded Newscred, which is described as a 'digital newspaper that will give you all the world's credible sources in one place.'

Essentially, you can design your page to give you news from MSM sources and credible blogs you then vote, in a similar way to using Digg, on whether you think they are credible and quality or not (something which they say distinguishes them from Digg, which is concerned with popularity). This is then displayed on the page.

It has therefore become 'a platform where readers can voice their opinion and join in discussions about the credibility of news media.'

I'll be giving this a go. But my doubts about it are just how the credibility system will work.

NewsCred say:

Our community votes on the credibility of articles, authors and news sources, and we apply our CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from the sources you love.

Obviously one role of bloggers/citizen journalists (what to call them? those not part of the MSM - amateurs?) is to check up on media reporters, and on each other. But what criteria exactly will be used to deduce how credible a source is, especially if we don't have access to the same material (I suppose the reply would be that we should have access to this material as well, and we will therefore be able to check).

I simply think there is a danger that blogs will be ranked by favouritism, and it will be subsequently hard for bloggers without a large following already to 'break-out' into consistent popularity.

Chacha at T&M News also raises a concern about Newscred:

'Credibility doesn’t work when you only have a set number of blogs, which most of are already found to be highly creditable. If you view the analytics for the entire site, most sources don’t go under 90-95%, and if 1/3 of them don’t even go below 99.60%. Basically, all you are doing is telling everyone that The New York Times is credible. (Did anyone doubt that before?) In order for credibility rankings to be effective, you need to have it be spread over a lot of sources, probably thousands, that there is actually a question whether they are credible.'

Focusing on amateur blogs, hyperlocal and niche citizen journalism projects rather than the best-known websites could make Newscred a more useful source. However, such a project of this is as much driven by those who use as those who run it.

Newscred continue:

'We firmly believe that a transparent and credible media industry is vital to the health of the world democracy. We've also done our research, and there are hundreds of surveys and papers that show that the public continues to fault news organizations (both traditional and online) for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes.'

As with so many online tools, the more users it gains the more effective it will be. It's still in a beta version right now, but I shall be trying it, and good luck to both its founders.

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