Third Time’s The Charm? A New NewsCred Raises $4 Million To Reinvent The Newswire Service - Rip Empson via TechCrunch
I think Empson is mischaracterizing this as a new play on the newswire. This isn’t like AP: it’s an aggregation of many news outlets into a single stream. Is it time for a complete ‘river of news’ service?
Rip Empson via TechCrunch
We first covered NewsCred back in 2008, when they launched a credibility rating score for publishers, authors, and stories (by way of community voting plus algorithms) in an attempt to help readers filter the noise and find the highest quality news.
Early last year, NewsCred relaunched as a “Ning for newspapers”, allowing users to build custom online newspapers in minutes. Both approaches seemed to hold water, and the startup raised $750K in seed funding from FLOODGATE and IA Ventures last September in support of it new look.
However, neither model quite caught on, and the NewsCred of today has landed somewhere in the middle. Co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam says that two years of iterating and nail-biting has led to the team deciding to ditch its consumer site, reprioritizing its focus on the simple (if not ambitious) goal of reinventing the concept of a newswire service.
To do so, NewsCred is licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Guardian, WashPo, and The Economist, and charging customers to access its news API — and the premium content from those publishers.
Hopefully, the third try is the charm. And, hey, quite a few reputable investors are willing to bet that it will be. Today, the startup announced that it has landed $4 million in series A funding led by FirstMark, with participation from Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Advancit Capital, through Shari Redstone. (FLOODGATE and IA Ventures also reinvested.)
An obvious investment for AOL Ventures, I guess. I bet this turns out to be more valuable that the money they are throwing away on Patch.
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dakedesu reblogged this from stoweboyd and added:
I am not certain how they expect to be able to get money from this. First off, this is the Internet. There is free...
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