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Think Google News, and then combine it with good and credible sources, social contribution and quality news. You get NewsCred.

NewsCred is a startup co-founded by Iraj and Shafqat in summer 2007. Designed just like a newspaper, NewsCred has a very clean layout with a nice white background. The layout resembles a magazine theme of Wordpress that I once came across, but never the less, the design is very well thought out. On the top bar are the major categories or sections of news like Top Stories, World, Sports, Entertainment etc, and then below that is the top stories module which contains 4 to top stories and the module changes them on click. After that come top stories from various popular sources like theguardian, Aljazeera, Newsweek, msnbc etc. Where as the column next to this shows popular news from blogs. The right sidebar contains the news sources which you can select and deselect various news sources to filter out the news according to your favorite sources.

The “credibility� of news comes from the fact that you can rank every news posted on NewsCred through a rating system. News can either be rated credible or discredited by any user. The rating of the news changes according to these stats. Also, an analysis can be seen of the rating of every news posted.

This makes for a pretty social activity but it seems like an easy target for spammers. If the whole process is so simple and automated, any user could post discredible news and rank it well enough through fake profiles. Unless they have a process to keep a check on it.

Another thing is that Pictures speak louder than words. But NewsCred focuses more on text rather than images. I would suggest them to show an image with the title of the news in the snippets, like they show the logo of the sources, as this will make it easier to find news of interest at a quick glance by the user.

Another interesting aim they have is :

NewsCred will be the first public database of journalists, along with their profiles, history of articles, comments, and credibility track records.

I haven’t seen any popular journalist yet on their website, but if that’s what they aim to achieve, then it’s a very good effort. What I would like to know is if they have talked to any popular and respected journalists yet to contribute and be a part of NewsCred or not.

Overall, NewsCred is definitely worth it, along side your morning cup of java.