08/25/2022

NewsGuard Announces Launch in Austria to Counter Misinformation

News-reliability service partners with A1 Telekom for easy access for Austrians 

  • NewsGuard has published credibility ratings and ‘Nutrition Labels’ that account for 90% of engagement with news online in Austria.
  • Subscribers of Austria A1 Telekom, the leading telecommunications company in the country, can access the NewsGuard browser extension at a nearly 80% discount ⁠— paying 1.10 euros per month, instead of the regular 4.95 euros.
  • Access to NewsGuard provided in libraries, as part of Media Literacy Partnership Program also available for libraries, sponsored by Microsoft.
  • Additional tools are made available to brands, advertising agencies and ad tech companies to help them stop financing misinformation such as websites publishing Russian disinformation​​.

(August 25, 2022) NewsGuard, a service that provides credibility ratings and “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news websites to help citizens distinguish reliable sites from misinformation providers, today announced its launch in Austria. NewsGuard applies nine basic, apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to news sites, giving them a score from 0-100, a Red or Green rating and a detailed explanation of the site. Consumers can access the ratings through a browser extension.

After having been active in Germany, France, Italy, Canada, the UK, as well as the US where the service launched in 2018, NewsGuard is bringing its solutions to Austria to help solve the problem of misinformation and disinformation online, without censoring any content. It defines its mission as countering misinformation online on behalf of readers, brands and democracies.

A1 Telekom, the leading telecommunications company in the country, is a launch sponsor. Its subscribers receive a special discount on NewsGuard’s browser extension, making the tool easily accessible for millions of Austrian households at the cost of 1.10 euros per month.

“We are excited to introduce NewsGuard as a new trusted partner in A1 and on our innovative and digital marketplace A1click.at,” said Michaela Jarisch, Head of Partnering and Innovation at A1 Telekom. “NewsGuard’s online protection against FakeNews will offer our customers a solution for an issue on the internet that has not been addressed enough. We are excited to be the first ones in Austria to change that”, said Matthias Lorenz, Sen. Director Transformation, Market & Corporate Functions.

Access to NewsGuard will also be available to libraries in Austria, under a global sponsorship provided by Microsoft under which more than 800 libraries provide the NewsGuard news-literacy tool to their patrons.

“I am thrilled to see NewsGuard’s internationally proven rating system for the trustworthiness of news media coming to Austria. Especially now, when Austrian journalism is experiencing a severe crisis of credibility,” said Andy Kaltenbrunner, founder of the research company Medienhaus Wien, and new member of NewsGuard’s global advisory board. “The continuous analysis of journalistic practice according to clear, transparent criteria gives orientation in a complex world of communication – and prevents further erosion of trust in independent journalism. High quality journalism is for Austria’s democracy more important than ever.”

NewsGuard’s human-curated Ratings and detailed Nutrition Labels, which initially will cover the news and information websites responsible for 90% of the news and information consumed and shared online in Austria were published today, providing consumers with guidance on each site’s credibility. 

“We are delighted to bring our tools to Austria,” said Steven Brill, NewsGuard co-CEO. “We are committed to applying fully transparent, apolitical criteria to all news sources there, as we’ve done in all countries where we’ve launched, so that consumers can have a better understanding of what they read online. In doing so, we believe that we can help restore trust in credible media, who suffer from the rise of misinformation providers parading as legitimate news sites.”

“We censor nothing,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. “But we provide information about who’s feeding you the news. How reliable are they? Do they have a hidden agenda? We’re starting with coverage of all the sites responsible for 90% of online engagement in Austria and will soon get to 95%. That means that with NewsGuard’s browser extension, the overwhelming majority of what users see in a Facebook feed, a Google or Bing Search, or on many other platforms will come with a NewsGuard trust rating. It also means that advertisers can use NewsGuard’s ‘exclusion lists’ of sites publishing misinformation and ‘inclusion lists’ of quality news publishers to make sure their money stops supporting hoaxes and supports legitimate news sites, including small local news sites and those serving disadvantaged communities – all of whom are on our humanly vetted inclusion lists.”

Thanks to Microsoft’s sponsorship, NewsGuard, which was praised in a CNN report recently as ‘A Librarian For The Internet’, also launched today its Media Literacy Partnership Program in Austria, which will allow patrons of public libraries to engage critically with the news and information websites in their social media feeds and search results. 

Microsoft has a licensing agreement with NewsGuard that allows all users of its Edge browser to access the NewsGuard plug-in extension for free. Users of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari can subscribe to the NewsGuard browser extension for $4.95 a month here.

As part of this launch, NewsGuard also announced today the addition of a new Senior Advisor to its team and to its global advisory board, to help tackle misinformation while addressing the nuances of Austria’s unique media ecosystem.

Andy Kaltenbrunner ⁠— political scientist, media researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and professor, as well as founder of the research company Medienhaus Wien ⁠— is joining NewsGuard as Senior Advisor for Austria and global advisory board member. He advises NewsGuard on the assessments of all nine criteria of journalistic practice that NewsGuard uses to rate each website, and he reviews all ratings and Nutrition Labels of news and information sites in Austria. 

After its launch with 90% of online engagement covered in Austria, NewsGuard will continue rating local news and information sites to reach at least 95% of online engagement in the country, a percentage it has reached in all its other markets (U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Canada, and Germany). In addition, NewsGuard will deploy its rapid response team of journalists to identify newly trending websites that have not yet been rated because they have just been launched.

Stopping the Billions in Ads Going to Misinformation

In addition to informing internet users on the credibility of the sources they read online, NewsGuard also works with advertisers, agencies, and ad tech companies to help them steer ad dollars away from sites spreading false narratives – where they inadvertently send an estimated $2.6 billion a year through programmatic advertising—and instead direct their ads to trustworthy news sites. This launch will enable current partners of NewsGuard to add hundreds of reliable Austrian websites to their inclusion lists, thus adding valuable audiences to their clients’ ad campaigns and creating new sources of revenue for Austria’s high-quality news publishers. 

 

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., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, and Italy. 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.

 

NewsGuard Contacts

  • Steven Brill, Co-CEO, steven.brill@newsguardtech.com, +1 212 332 6301
  • Gordon Crovitz, Co-CEO, gordon.crovitz@newsguardtech.com, +1 212 332 6407
  • Marie Richter, Managing Editor Germany, marie.richter@newsguardtech.com