Fake news? "Alternative facts"? Misinformation? In this digital age, where information dissemination is lightning fast, and sometimes with vast consequences, the ability to discern what is and who is credible has become important for PR, Comms and Marketing professionals.

This is why we are excited to announce our integration Partnership with NewsGuard, a company that evaluates and rates the credibility and transparency of news and information websites. NewsGuard’s ratings and nutrition labels helps Brands and PR professionals identify credible websites, as well non-credible ones, and with this information at hand, they can quickly detect potential sources of misinformation before it spreads and becomes damaging to their client or brand. Our integration partnership with NewsGuard is therefore a strong USP for media monitoring on Pulsar and brings an additional layer of data analysis and insight. This is in addition to our ever expanding and sophisticated library of AI models that’s currently available to all Pulsar clients.

Each site is rated using nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, giving the site a score out of 100. These criteria measure the site on credibility and transparency and are listed in order of their importance in determining a Green or Red rating.

Based on the nine criteria, each site gets an overall rating, which can be one of the following:

For more information on NewsGuard and how they classify online sites, you can find out more here: https://www.newsguardtech.com/solutions/newsguard/.

By integrating NewsGuard ratings into Pulsar, we wanted to help users understand the overall nature of the conversation and measure the spread and impact of misinformation because of non-credible news sources in a dataset. We also wanted to go a step further, and help users identify the authors who are credible or non credible sources of information, based on the content they write, and the content they share.

So, with that in mind, as of July 6th 2022, you'll now be able to access our NewsGuard integration in any search on Pulsar TRAC. Through this integration you'll be able to glean some useful insights around the type of coverage you're getting, and so much more! We've put together below some of those use cases.

Using the tool, we can understand and visualise the scale of non-credible data sources in a dataset, over time, by volume, visibility and reach. These can be news sites, blogs and forums.

Quickly discover the most-engaged-with content that's coming from both credible data sources and non-credible sources.

A look at the most shared credible or non credible news sites, and the content that's being shared from those sites. This is split into most Shared Websites and most Shared Links, as shown below:

A look at the online sites that are producing information that can be deemed as untrustworthy, and the authors who are sharing it. This is represented in Top Sites and Top Authors, as shown below.

The first of these illustrates the top websites in a dataset, grouped into credible sites, non-credible sites, satirical sites, and sites where the content is user-generated. This is another way to visualize and understand the volume of data sources that are trustworthy versus those that are untrustworthy, helping you to intuitively understand the type of media coverage you're receiving around a particular topic.

The Top Authors visualisation, meanwhile, illustrates the most influential users within a dataset, as well as an analysis of the type of content they share (not write) - and how often they share that content. This helps to identify authors who are notorious for sharing information from non-credible sites or credible ones.

Alternatively, if you want to learn which authors, namely journalists, write for credible or non-credible sites, then you can do that too. This can be achieved by using the Pulsar filter options available, as shown below:

Speaking of filter options, this is a nice segue into discussing the additional tools that we've made available to allow you to: filter, sort and export your results with NewsGuard data. To learn more about this, click on the button below 👇

Please note that:

Otherwise, that's all for our announcement! If you have any feedback on this integration, then we'd love to hear from you, and you can do so via our usual channels, the in-app chat tool, Collaborate, or email support@pulsarplatform.com.