09/07/2022
Meltwater and NewsGuard announce partnership to help organizations understand and combat the spread of misinformation
(New York — September 7, 2022) Meltwater, a global leader in media and social intelligence, today announces a partnership with NewsGuard, a company that employs trained journalists to rate the credibility of news sources and track the top false narratives spreading online.
This partnership will allow Meltwater customers to leverage NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels'” for thousands of news sources globally. These ratings enable brands and organizations to understand where they are being mentioned, and receive alerts when their brand is mentioned on unreliable sites that frequently spread false claims.
Meltwater customers will also be able to deploy NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints – a constantly updated catalog of the top myths circulating online. By combining the Fingerprints with Meltwater’s media intelligence capabilities, companies and organizations can quickly detect the spread of hundreds of false narratives across social platforms and news sources.
Meltwater CEO John Box said: “Knowing whether to trust in the reliability and accuracy of information found online is a major issue today. Our customers need to know where their organization is being mentioned, from the most esteemed news outlets, to fringe forums and sites peddling ‘fake news.’ They also need to be able to quickly and efficiently respond to any misinformation being shared knowingly or unknowingly on social media. Using Meltwater, our customers already tap into the most comprehensive content set across news and social media globally, and our partnership with NewsGuard gives our customers richer insight into that source base. This partnership will provide customers with an additional lens to understand and report on the quality and credibility of their news coverage, as well as potential misinformation around their brand on social media.”
NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill said: “Reputation is one of every good brand’s greatest assets — and misinformation is one of the newest threats to that asset. To shield themselves against the reputational harms posed by misinformation, companies and organizations need to stay on top of how misinformation impacts their brand and industry. This collaboration with Meltwater will bring our misinformation protections to a new scale, enabling Meltwater’s more than 27,000 customers globally to gain access to this solution.”
“We already have a large, high-profile institution using this solution to better understand and mitigate the proliferation of misinformation around public health initiatives. Plus, we know the types of companies and institutions most frequently targeted by bad actors with respect to misinformation. Because we currently work with a significant number of these organizations in some capacity today, we have a good understanding as to how our customers in both the private and public sectors can benefit from this partnership. We look forward to helping many of our customers leverage this new relationship to help them more effectively manage potential risk around their brand,” said John Box, CEO of Meltwater.
For more information on how this partnership can benefit your organization, please email newsguard@meltwater.com to learn more.
About NewsGuard
Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites. NewsGuard rates all the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, and Italy. In August 2022, NewsGuard also launched in Austria. NewsGuard products include NewsGuard, BrandGuard, which helps marketers concerned about their brand safety, and the Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of top hoaxes.
NewsGuard rates each site based on nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a site repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. It awards weighted points for each criterion and sums them up; a score of less than 60 earns a “Red” rating, while 60 and above earns a “Green” rating, which indicates it is generally reliable.
NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels can be licensed by internet service providers, browsers, news aggregators, education companies, and social media and search platforms in order to make NewsGuard’s information about news websites available to their users.
Consumers can access these ratings by purchasing a subscription to NewsGuard, which costs $4.95/month, €4.95/month or £4.95/month, and includes access to NewsGuard’s browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and its mobile app for iOS and Android. The extension is available for free on Microsoft’s Edge browser through a license agreement with Microsoft. Hundreds of public libraries globally receive free access to use NewsGuard’s browser extension on their public-access computers to give their patrons more context for the news they encounter online. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.
About Meltwater
Meltwater provides social and media intelligence. By examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs and news sites, Meltwater helps companies make better, more informed decisions based on insight from the outside. The company was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with 50 offices across six continents. The company has 2,300 employees and 27,000 corporate customers, including industry leaders in several sectors. Learn more at meltwater.com.
NewsGuard Contact
- Sarah Brandt / EVP, Partnerships / sarah.brandt@newsguardtech.com
Meltwater Contact
- Johnny Vance / VP, Partnerships and Business Development / johnny.vance@meltwater.com