Misinformation and disinformation thrive best in the dark. And like fungus and mildew in a cellar, they disintegrate quickly when air and sunlight arrive on the scene.

In the emerging area of online trust technology, the startup NewsGuard has decided to disinfect the web of false reporting with the detergent of journalism. A team of experienced journalists researches online news brands; determines when a website has a hidden agenda or publishes falsehoods; and then posts red or green rating signals visible as a plug-in on many web browsers. Public libraries can use NewsGuard as a news literacy tool, while advertisers can keep their brands off unreliable sites. Journalism advocates the Knight Foundation and global advertising conglomerate Publicis are among the company’s investors.

“The world has become such that regular people feel very anxious about whether they’re getting news from reliable sources or not,” says Gordon Crovitz, a distinguished publishing veteran who co-founded NewsGuard with acclaimed journalist Steve Brill in 2018. In 2016 and 2017, Crovitz was interim CEO, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also a former publisher, editorial board member, and opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

“In the print era, people would go to a newsstand in order to acquire newspapers, and they might say, ‘Well, I like the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I don’t want the National Enquirer,’ – knowing that one of them was a respected local newspaper and the other one was a kind of grocery store gossip sheet,” Crovitz says.

“On the internet, where people are thumbing through their Facebook feeds or their Twitter feeds or looking at the next video that pops up on YouTube, the value of those brands has disappeared. There are so many brands, people don’t know what to make of any particular one,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“And that is the problem that NewsGuard set out to help solve on behalf of news consumers: Which websites are trying to do journalism? Which ones are doing something else? And for all of them, to give them a red rating or a green rating and a nutrition label writeup that explains everything that a reader would want to know about that particular website so that he or she can make up his or her mind about whether to read news from that website with an extra grain or two of salt.”