Everyone from Elon Musk to AdBlock Plus wants to tell you which news sources are worth trusting.
Now news aggregator Nuzzel is joining in.Specifically, its launching NuzzelRank, which founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams described as our new authority ranking of thousands of top news sources, using signals from top business influencers.
He said it replaces a more simplistic ranking system that it was using for its news monitoring and research product Nuzzel Media Intelligence.You may also see NuzzelRank outside the companys Media Intelligence reports.
For one thing, theres a new page with rankings of Nuzzels top sources.
For another, Abrams said publishers will be able to add badges with their NuzzelRank scores to their websites, and he also plans to make this data available through an API.At this point, youre probably wondering how Nuzzel does this ranking.
Youre definitely wondering that if you looked at the top sources ranking and saw that TechCrunch is comes in at number four overall.
Thats right: We score below The New York Times and The Washington Post, but aboveThe New Yorker and Wired which is both flattering and a little nuts.Abrams said there are three main ways that Nuzzel calculates the score.
First, theres data within Nuzzel itself, including the reading behavior of its users.
Second, its looking at external signals about the engagement and authority of news sources.Third, its working with a whole bunch of outside organizations that have developed different approaches to scoring news sources and sorting out which ones are and arent trustworthy so Nuzzel is joining the Trust Project and the Credibility Coalition, and its also partnering with NewsGuard and Deepnews.ai.In the announcement, Abrams emphasized that the company isnt relying on human editors or making these judgments on its own: Nuzzel has always focused on building scalable solutions that use software to aggregate existing valuable signals to provide useful results, rather than human approaches that are not scalable and subject to bias.