What does Accountable Press do?
Accountable Press:
- Verifies that Certified Accountable Press Publishers have a working physical address and contact information on their site and Accountable Press profile, thereby assuring they are who they say they are and can be legally contacted if needed.
- Allows Certified Accountable Press publishers to document, on their Accountable Press profile, their media and business licenses, social media, business profiles, accreditations, and awards that they have earned.
- Provides Certified Accountable Press publishers with initial and ongoing education about original reporting, accountability, proper attribution, and responsible journalism.
- Lobbies news consumers, search engines, and news aggregators to consider Certified Accountable Press Publishers as more professional, trusted, and accountable, than anonymous news sites with no or fake address information.
Why should we consider Accountable Press Certification as a strong quality signal?
You need your news algorithm to surface trustworthy sites.
However, the internet is littered with fake, low-quality, content-stealing, sites that do a good job of posing as legitimate publishers.
These fake sites have one thing in common. They don’t want to be held accountable for what they publish. So they use fake contact information… or no contact information at all.
It’s impractical for you to vet every publisher to make sure they have a real, working, legal, physical, address.
Accountable Press does that for you.
Not only that. We also teach and test each Certified Accountable Press Publisher to make sure they understand the basics of original reporting, attribution, accountability, and responsible journalism.
And we decertify sites that don’t maintain working physical addresses or blatantly disregard the copyrights of others.
Whether you add Accountable Press Certification as a quality signal to your algorithm, or require publishers to be Certified in order to surface in your results, Accountable Press can help you improve the quality of your news corpus.
We strongly encourage Certified Accountable Press Publishers to display the Certified Accountable Press Seal on their site’s footer or sidebar. By clicking on the Seal, you can view the publisher’s current profile and certification status on Accountable.Press.
Should Certified Accountable Press Publishers automatically be trusted as reliable news sources?
Accountable Press does not evaluate the quality of a publication’s news content.
We provide an important starting point by verifying that a publisher: 1) has a working, legal, physical, contact address; 2) has a basic understanding of original reporting, attribution, accountability, and responsible journalism; 3) and does not have any substantiated copyright infringement reports with Accountable Press.
Your news algorithm should then process sites and articles for additional quality signals.
How do we verify a news publishers Certification?
Please see the the options on our Info for News Aggregators page.
Have a question not answered here?
Please contact us at [email protected]. Confidentiality is assured.
