NewsGuard is a new tool, available free to libraries and educators, designed to spread news literacy and combat misinformation. Its trained journalists review news sites using nine journalistic standards and write Nutrition Label reviews to give people more context for the credibility of their online news sources. Following a successful launch in the US last year, NewsGuard recently launched in the UK, publishing its ratings and Nutrition Labels for the websites representing more than 90% of the news consumed online in the UK (read coverage in The Guardian here).
NewsGuard is delighted to partner with libraries that install its free browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge) on staff and patron computers, providing patrons with more context for the information they see in their search results and on social media. More than 200 libraries in the US have started using NewsGuard — from Los Angeles to Toledo, Ohio (you can read about Toledo Library’s experience in this Library Journal feature).
NewsGuard is pleased to be working with the Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians to spread the word to librarians about this free service. Stella Thebridge, chair of ASCEL, said: “We are delighted to recommend the NewsGuard initiative to users of libraries across the UK. The unique alerts provided by NewsGuard to the provenance of news websites means that all computer users can be fully informed about the accuracy and source of the information they are reading, enabling them to take their own view about what they are reading. We hope both public and school libraries will see the benefits of offering NewsGuard on networked computers as well as encouraging individuals to add NewsGuard to their own devices.”