Several months ago a colleague asked a group of legal information professionals if they had come up with a way to eliminate “bad” sources from news alerts. I have seen RT News – a notorious source for Russian propaganda show up in  alerts on artificial intelligence. Many law firm competitive intelligence operations rely on news aggregation platforms to curate alerts on companies, industries and issues. Platforms such as Vable, Ozmosys, Manzama and LexisNexis Newsdesk scan an ocean of daily news stories, social media and press releases in order to curate and surface stories relevant to a specific issue. To date, no aggregation platform has offered a tool for flagging or eliminating stories from “unreliable” sources. Human curation may flag bad sources but automated alerts may deliver news from a questionable source unless an alert is limited to a few reliable sources. Help may be on the way in the form of a product called NewsGuard.

NewsGuard will not rate individual stories but will evaluate the overall reliability of the news source. According to the company’s press release, NewsGuard will begin offering “reliability ratings” and news “nutrition labels”. The reliability
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