04/18/2018

NewsGuard Announces Addition of Two Veteran Journalists to Analyst Team

Senior Editors Join from the New York Times and the AP

(NEW YORK, April 18, 2018) NewsGuard, the new service that uses trained journalists to review thousands of news and information sites to identify purveyors of fake news online, announced today that it has hired two long-time journalists with extensive experience covering media, politics and culture, Joyce Purnick and Amy Westfeldt, as deputy managing editors for its team of analysts.

Purnick has spent more than 40 years reporting, analyzing and editing the news in her native New York. For most of that time, she was at the New York Times, where she served for many years as the paper’s MetroMatters columnist, was a member of the Times’s Editorial Board, and was the first woman to serve as the Times’s City Hall bureau chief and Metropolitan Editor.

She is also the author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.” The stepmother of three, grandmother of six, Purnick lives in Manhattan with her husband, Max Frankel.

Westfeldt, a 25-year veteran of The Associated Press, pioneered the AP’s real-time fact checking of false news stories stories shortly after the 2016 U.S. election, in an initiative with Facebook to reduce the spread of misinformation on the platform. She founded the “Not Real News” brand for the AP, featuring a weekly list of viral, untrue claims circulating online.

As a news manager at the AP’s Nerve Center, a global coordination hub, Westfeldt oversaw a Trending News desk and worked closely with top digital customers, developing new ways to curate AP content. Earlier, she spent several years as a supervising editor on the AP’s national and Top Stories desks and also oversaw the AP’s metropolitan New York bureau. Westfeldt is enjoying raising her four-year-old twin girls in Manhattan.

“We’re delighted that two highly skilled editors known for their rigor and for their commitment to great journalism are joining the mission,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill. “With the addition of Joyce and Amy, we are now well placed to produce and deliver the thousands of site reviews that will give citizens the information they need to judge whether the sources they consume every day are credible.”

Purnick and Westfeldt are joining NewsGuard’s editorial leadership team, which includes Executive Editor Jim Warren, former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, and Managing Editor Eric Effron, former executive editor of The Week magazine and editor in charge of business and legal news at Reuters.

NewsGuard, co-founded in March, 2018, by Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz, with lead funding from Publicis Groupe, will rate and provide “Nutrition Label” write-ups on the thousands of news and information websites and video channels that account for 98% of engagement with news online in the U.S. These labels will be available before the midterm elections in the U.S. this November. In addition, a SWAT team of NewsGuard analysts will operate 24/7 to identify, rate and review suddenly trending news among sites that NewsGuard has not yet rated and warn Internet users about them in real time.

For more information, please contact NewsGuard Managing Editor Eric Effron, eric.effron@newsguardtech.com

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