Newspage has launched News Desk, a free newswire alternative for the property finance industry.
Newspage trialled News Desk with a number of mortgage brokers during July.
The brokers were given the same ability to create alerts as the Newspage editorial team and journalists.
The stories they identified as news — and verified by inviting other brokers and financial services experts to comment — were sent to a mixture of trade and national news media.
More than 100 articles were published as a result, in titles including the Evening Standard, FTAdviser, The Intermediary and Daily Telegraph.
Publishers will be able to choose between video, audio and text-based content when the mobile app launches in the Autumn.
During August, Newspage users in multiple sectors will be invited to join the News Desk.
Jukka Väänänen, CEO of Newspage, said: “If social media has shown us anything, it’s that the modern news desk is everyone, everywhere.
“The issue for news publishers to date, given the scale of social media and the level of noise, has been identifying the real news from the fake news, the stories that genuinely matter to people from the PR puff.
“The Newspage News Desk solves that, as our news team is made up of verified experts in their fields and grows as our user base grows.
“For the sake of editorial integrity, the stories our users identify must be validated on the Newspage newschain before being sent to news media, who have full editorial control over what they choose to publish.”
Väänänen added: “When we launched, the goal of Newspage was to enable everyone to have access to the media for free, and we have achieved that.
“We are now giving the media the stories everyone wants to read, because they are identified as stories and validated by everyone.
“We see the News Desk as the future of newswires, as the news on it is identified by experts in real time, validated by other experts in minutes and can provide critical editorial support and curated grass-roots content to news desks for free.”
Dominic Hiatt, founder of Newspage, added: “Sourcing high quality and impartial content can prove a considerable cost for news publishers, whether that’s via editorial teams in-house, paying freelancers or using traditional newswires.
“With the Newspage News Desk, we have the solution to that. Now, news publishers can receive a regular feed of genuinely collaborative news content, over which they have full editorial control, at no cost.
“The content generated by our News Desk can run seamlessly alongside their existing editorial resources as a free feed, help power it, or both — the choice is theirs.
“We see traditional newswires being replaced by a democratic, bottom-up newswire where the readers, the experts in their specific sectors, are co-writers, with the end news publisher having full editorial control.
“Sourced from the front line of the economy, and with unlimited expert-powered intel, our news is often faster than that of traditional newswires, verified via the platform as news that matters and, perhaps best of all for news publishers, is free.”
