Newscr… nope.
Newscre…e… nope. One more time
Newscre…e….e….e…d! Finally got it out. Newscred [crunchbase] is a ‘News’ aggregator that was founded in July ‘07 and came out in private alpha testing May ‘08, then finally released a public beta in August ‘08. Its a very simple service. The idea of it is to rank newspapers and blogs based on credibility. You see an article, you read it, and you rate whether you think the article is credible or not. This vote later affects the credibility ranking of the author who wrote the article as well as the source.
At first it sounds like a really great idea, but you’d be very quick to realize how it can very quickly turn into a lost cause.
I do want to make a quick disclaimer that I love the idea of ranking news on credibility. Done in the right context, it is very useful to find out if a blog has been known to publish non-credible stories. But there are a lot of factors that have to go in with it.
The first thing you’ll notice with Newscred is it is a lot like any other newspaper. On the top stretches a big menu bar giving you links to the different sections of the site. Each section has its own set of sources that you can choose from. In example, Techcrunch is only featured in the Technology Section, and the Economist isn’t featured in the Sport Section.
On the side of the page you will see 2 sections that allow you to choose which sources you want to have aggregated into this section. No, wait… Under the ‘Sign Up Free’ block that never goes away, even while you are logged in, you will see 2 sections that allow you to choose your sources. There are about 154 sources in total, and all are linked at the bottom of every page.
Here is my first problem. 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.
Moving on, viewing news is rather simple. On the top of every section is a flash ticker, much like the ones you find on other popular news sites, that takes 4 stories and displays them. Under it are two column. Scratch that, one big column and one small column. The big column is for newspaper stories, and the small one is for blog sources. Anyone see the problem yet? Newspapers are very often credible, while the more likely to be non-credible sources are blogs. The big column probably draws in more clicks than the smaller one. By having everyone click on the credible sources, the non-credible sources never get voted on, never getting actually marked as non-credible, defeating the purpose of the site. I’m not saying this is the way it is. I’m sure many people click on the blog articles, but I’m sure that it isn’t as popular as news stories.