• by Ray Schultz , March 30, 2021

The new service, Responsible Advertising for News Segments (RANS), offers both exclusion and inclusion capabilities.

RANS provides advertisers with the option to include news and information news sites targeting groups harmed by over-use of keyword blocklisting, including Black, Asian, Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities.

It also helps companies avoid funding the “online misinformation and disinformation that has become such a scourge,” states Steven Brill, co-CEO of NewsGuard.

NewsGuard rates sites based on nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether: a site repeatedly publishes false content; if regularly corrects or clarifies errors; and if it avoids deceptive headlines. 

The firm awards weighted points for each of these criteria.

A score of less than 60 earns a “Red” rating, while sites earning 60 and above get a “Green” rating, meaning they are reliable.

“In working with NewsGuard, we can provide our clients deeper granularity to curate the right inventory and support publishers with editorial integrity,” states Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group NA.

Brill notes: “Even for brands whose CEOs, boards and shareholders have so admirably made corporate social responsibility a priority this has been a blind spot — not because they want to advertise irresponsibly, but because ad tech alone cannot do the job or even report accurately where it is failing.”

NewsGuard was launched in 2018 by journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.