02/23/2022

Pulsar and NewsGuard to help PR and Marketing professionals detect misinformation before it spreads

Audience intelligence platform Pulsar and NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news sources, are launching an integration to detect early signals of misinformation, measure the impact of those narratives on public opinion, and help public relations and marketing professionals respond quickly to protect their brands’ reputation.

In a first-of-its-kind integration, Pulsar will bring NewsGuard’s source credibility ratings into its audience intelligence platform – which already brings together social, news, search, web, forum, audience, and first-party data. NewsGuard’s journalistically trained analysts have rated all the news and information sources that account for 95% of engagement online, applying nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice to determine which sources are generally reliable and which ones publish misinformation and hoaxes.

Pulsar customers will be able to segment news and social content based on the credibility of the source that is publishing it, identify bubbles of misinformation and their drivers, and monitor the influence of different sources across the audiences and conversations that matter to them.

“Misinformation narratives pollute public opinion every day, but they can be hard to identify just by looking at the content,” said Pulsar co-founder & CEO Francesco D’Orazio. “The context, such as the credibility of the news source, often gives clear hints. Pulsar has a long history of adding context to the content we see online, and this partnership with NewsGuard adds another crucial piece of background to help PR professionals and marketers stay ahead.”

NewsGuard’s standardized criteria for measuring source trustworthiness will add a new layer to audience, media and public conversation understanding, enabling marketing, research, and communications professionals to:

  • Move more confidently in their analysis and execution, 
  • Assess the impact of news stories on brand reputation in real time, 
  • Prioritize media outreach and crisis management, and
  • Monitor brand safety for media planning in the conversations that matter to them

“Pulsar is leading the way in the social and media intelligence industry by providing an innovative new feature that tackles one of the top reputational threats brands face today,” said Steven Brill, Co-CEO of NewsGuard. “NewsGuard’s Reliability Ratings have already helped hundreds of partners across industries ranging from technology platforms and advertising companies to libraries and schools, and this partnership will bring this same solution to a new audience of marketing and PR professionals.”

 

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 sources. NewsGuard rates all the news and information sources that account for 95% of online engagement across the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Italy. 

NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted by trained journalists using nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a news source repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. Based on the criteria, each source receives an overall trust rating, a trust score of 0-100, a score on each of the nine criteria, and a detailed “Nutrition Label” explaining the rating and providing examples of the site’s editorial practices. Advertisers, advertising agencies and advertising tech companies license NewsGuard’s ratings to direct their programmatic advertising toward legitimate journalism and avoid misinformation. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.

About Pulsar

Pulsar is the leading AI-powered audience intelligence platform. Combining conversational and behavioral signals from the world’s leading digital destinations, Pulsar help brands understand their audiences and create messages that matter to them. It is part of the AIM-listed Access Intelligence Group. 

 

NewsGuard contact: 

  • Sarah Brandt, EVP of Partnerships, +1 512-710-8954‬‬, sarah.brandt@newsguardtech.com

Pulsar contact: 

  • Alex Bryson, Alex.bryson@pulsarplatform.com