Veena McCoole is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at NewsGuard, an internet trust tool providing online safety for brands, readers and democracies by harnessing the power of journalism — not algorithms.
NewsGuard is a tool that shows you trust ratings for more than 7,500 news and information websites as you browse the internet. It is installed as a browser extension that works within your internet browser as you search for news and information online. NewsGuard ratings are also available as an app on mobile devices and are integrated directly into products such as the Microsoft Edge mobile app and Neeva search engine through licensing partnerships.
At NewsGuard, Veena leads UK partnerships with technology platforms, advertisers, researchers, schools and libraries, which leverage NewsGuard’s human-sourced data on the reliability of news websites to avoid misinformation and promote trustworthy content. NewsGuard’s global editorial staff of trained journalists publish agenda-setting reports on misinformation, as well as detailed “Nutrition Label” reviews evaluating a news site’s adherence to nine apolitical criteria of transparency and credibility.
NewsGuard’s reliability ratings have been integrated with notable next-gen ethical technology platforms to widen access to our data and empower users with crucial context when browsing online.
Bright, a new social media network focused on trust, privacy, and meaningful connections, has partnered with NewsGuard to help its members avoid misinformation and engage with credible news on the platform. Similarly, Neeva, the first ads-free, private subscription search engine, founded by former Google and YouTube executives, integrated NewsGuard’s credibility and transparency ratings into its search results, providing users with free access to NewsGuard’s explanatory Nutrition Labels for news sources. Users can click on the name of a news source in their search results to see how the site fared on NewsGuard’s nine criteria and to read its Nutrition Label review.
Since NewsGuard’s founding in 2018, we have forged relationships with educational institutions, research communities, universities, and public libraries around the world to make our data accessible to consumers, students, and professionals working in media literacy. From empowering middle schoolers as they embark on their first research projects to providing the patrons of more than 800 public libraries with free access to NewsGuard’s browser extension, NewsGuard serves as a crucial media literacy teaching tool for students and adults alike.
For younger students who are learning media literacy, NewsGuard provides comprehensive support for online research. As one educator from the Whitby School in Connecticut put it: “When I asked my class how they can tell if a source is reliable… the answer that about five called out at the same time was ‘NewsGuard!’ NewsGuard has now joined Google as a verb, at least in my classes. As in, ‘The way I can check if my source is reliable is by NewsGuarding it.’ “
NewsGuard regularly works with nonprofits, community groups, schools, and libraries to offer free workshops that teach how to spot and avoid misinformation, and how to evaluate the reliability of content.
Public libraries, educational institutions, technology platforms and other stakeholders interested in learning more about NewsGuard should contact veena.mccoole@newsguardtech.com.
