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 where NewsGuard comes in. NewsGuard are 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.

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.

By integrating NewsGuard ratings into Pulsar, we want to help users understand the overall nature of the conversation and measure the potential spread and impact of misinformation because of non-credible news sources in a dataset. We also want 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. 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 by Media Reach.

Quickly discover the top content grouped by social shares, visibility, or media reach, and discern what's being published on credible sites, non-credible sites or even satirical ones.

This is split into Most Shared Websites and Most Shared Links, as shown below. Most Shared Websites are the websites that people on social media mostly link to when they are discussing a particular topic. The majority of this linking occurs on X, Facebook and discussion sites like Reddit and other Forums. Most Shared Links are the links that people on social media include in their posts when discussing a topic and likewise, the majority of these links are also being shared on X, Facebook and sites like Reddit.

This gives you some insight into the online sites that are producing information that can be deemed as credible or untrustworthy. The ranking in the table is sorted by websites producing the highest volume of content or articles and the credibility ranking of those sites. We also provide a link to the full nutrition label, which gives a detailed break down of why that site was assigned that score.

One effective way to assess the credibility and potential risk of misinformation related to your brand or the topic you're studying is by examining the authors who are writing for specific outlets, mostly journalists, as well as those who are sharing that media coverage on social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and Reddit, mostly users. By analyzing the frequency with which these authors publish or share content from reliable or untrustworthy sources, you can identify users who may pose a potential risk of spreading misinformation. This approach allows you to gain a deeper understanding of the credibility and reputation of the sources that are being shared and helps you to identify and mitigate any potential risks.