• by Tony Silber , February 10, 2022

Image above: part of NewsGuard's report on the OAN website.

NewsGuard, the ratings service that provides credibility assessments and “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites, on Thursday announced a collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission to provide the EC with its data monitoring that tracks online misinformation.

The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. The EC’s Joint Research Centre supports EU policies with independent scientific evidence throughout policy-making cycles.

Specifically in the partnership with NewsGuard, the Joint Research Centre’s disinformation team will work with NewsGuard to research and analyze online disinformation, and produce tools to help media analysts and fact checkers detect and manage such issues.

NewsGuard’s team of journalists has tracked online misinformation since 2018, using human intelligence to rate and create “Nutrition Labels” that indicate the overall reliability of online news and information sources.

The New York City-based company applies nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to each website, producing a 0-100 score with a green or red rating and Nutrition Label. Ratings are available by subscription or free to consumers through the Microsoft Edge browser and the Neeva search engine.

NewsGuard’s ratings database covers all the news and information sites that account for 95% of online engagement in France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S., along with 90% of engagement in Canada.

"NewsGuard’s data will allow JRC analysts to increase the scope and quality of their research on mis/disinformation on topics such as COVID-19 or climate change," said Jens Linge, scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, in a press release.

NewsGuard, for its part, said the new partnership will serve to reinforce its relationship with the EC.

NewsGuard was founded in March 2018 by the media entrepreneur  Steven Brill and the former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. They serve as co-CEOs.

Disclosure: I worked briefly as a contract researcher and writer for NewsGuard in 2018, and Steven Brill was CEO of MediaCentral in 2001-2002, where I served as publisher of Folio: Magazine.