New Open Initiative Allows Publishers, Journalists and News Organizations to Identify their Original Work Across all Distribution Channels
VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA (September 3rd, 2019) – Pressland (pressland.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Codebase Ventures Inc. ("Codebase" or the "Company") (CSE: CODE - FSE: C5B – OTCQB: BKLLF), today announced the launch of a new initiative that will accelerate its mission to fight fake news and misinformation online.
The Universal News Identifier (https://universalnews.id), or UNID, is an open initiative to help publishers, journalists and other news organizations gain greater transparency across digital platforms to help restore audiences’ trust in their work.
Pressland is building a data management platform that fights fake news and misinformation by bringing greater transparency to the news creation process. The company’s proprietary software collects, analyzes and indexes the media’s around-the-clock production data. This data will be offered to social networks, search engines and news distributors as a SaaS product. Pressland recently announced a new milestone, with 10 million articles, two million tags and 200,000 authors indexed and analyzed.
UNID is the first of many of Pressland’s planned initiatives currently under development. When complete, the Universal News Protocol will serve as an open resource for the news industry.
“When it comes to data standards, other industries are years, if not decades, ahead of news,” said Jeff Koyen, CEO and Founder, Pressland and Chief Strategy Officer, Codebase Ventures Inc. “These standards give consumers confidence when they book a hotel room on a travel website, for example, or search real estate listings. This is the level of trust Pressland intends to bring to media business, and UNID is just the beginning.”
Unique UNID tags are created to identify articles and other news items as soon as they are published online. Semantic markup is then used by Pressland to:
- Index the production data associated with this article, including the professional credentials of reporters, editors and publishers and their related work;
- Track the distribution of this article across digital channels, including social media and third-party apps; and
- Make this data available to clients, partners and other third parties using the Pressland API.
“Pressland’s goal is to create individual ‘flight data recorders’ for every published article and news item,” Koyen continued. “These packets of data, identified by their UNIDs, can be used to separate real news from fake, and prevent the spread of misinformation before it can go viral.”
UNID is interoperable with existing semantic web protocols, and it’s plug-and-play with major content management systems. Participation is strictly optional: Pressland’s data analysis platform does not require any technical changes on the part of publishers for their work to be indexed and verified.
More information is available at the UNID website, https://universalnews.id.
“Data standards that increase transparency and trust are long overdue for journalism,” said Brian Keane, Director, Codebase Ventures. “We’re excited to support Pressland as they lead the charge in this ground-breaking and vitally important development.”
Pressland is led by Koyen, a technology entrepreneur, veteran media executive and award-winning journalist who has worked for Wired, The New York Times, Forbes, Digiday and other news organizations around the world. He’s made media appearances that vary from Scarborough Country to the Howard Stern Show.
The company is headquartered in Brooklyn; more than one dozen team members are distributed globally from New Orleans to Hong Kong. Pressland also publishes News-to-Table (newstotable.com), a digital magazine dedicated to issues of media trust and transparency.
