I an an unapologetic liberal. I am also a news junky who hates media for putting profits above honesty. This behavior causes me to be skeptical of ALL for-profit news sources. I spend countless hours researching news that is questionable. I AM YOUR DREAM CUSTOMER. I would gladly pay you to provide reliable evaluations of content. BUT, I DELETED YOUR APP AFTER DOWNLOADING IT BECAUSE YOU WON’t ALLOW ME TO ASSESS YOUR SERVICE WITHOUT SEEING WHAT I’M BUYING) I don’t commit my time or money blindly. (your signup procedure takes my time, more so if I have to cancel in 2 weeks) It’s a shame that an honest company trying to stay in business while providing a valuable service may fail because of a bad business model. Trust your customers (I have never seen evaluations so bifurcated, only 1s and 5s) your market is already cynical don’t give us a silly reason to avoid you

I learned about this app from an article on the Democratic National Committee website about combating disinformation. I don’t normally pay for apps but I checked this out because the DNC recommended it. Otherwise I’d probably never have considered it because I don’t really look at much disinformation online because almost all of my information sources are quite reputable and reliable. But when NewsGuard presents you with its assessment of a news site you get as many examples as needed to solidly validate the evaluation of various journalistic practices, information about ownership, investors, management structure, the history of the site, whatever is relevant to how the quantitative ratings were arrived at. Every piece of information is backed up with a link to its source

The app does a great job of detailing each news site, states current examples of stories from the site and if they are accurate or not with linked sources to back it all up. Those complaining that this is an anti conservative app are just mad that the places they get their news are filled with false or altered stories and stay away from the truth. The app is great at debunking sites on both the left and the right, it’s just a fact that the sites to right are more often spreading false information. The app is fair, transparent and factual and they back it all up with sources and repeated requests to sites for clarification on their stories.

This is a pay app but they don’t say that up front. You can sign up for an account and when you get to the give us your credit card information, there’s an option that says “Continue signing up for a 2-week free trial subscription,” but you’re required to give your credit card information. Huh?? If you don’t want to, there’s a “Maybe Later” link that should be labeled (if they’re being truthful), “click here to leave this page but you won’t be able to use the app until you give us your credit card information even though we have a 2-week “free” trial.”