How Trooclick uses quotes to rank 'quality' news

There has been much debate about the algorithm used by different media companies like Google and Facebook to rank news and whether this ultimately works for or against news organisations.

Part of what drives people to read news is the popularity of the topic and how many of their peers have already read a story, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of 'the dress' earlier this year.

However, Trooclick believes "the world is going to change and evolve to a quality criteria", according to chief executive Stanislas Motte.

This is why he founded the Paris-based media company in November 2012, with the initial aim of performing automated fact-checking of business and financial news in English.

After investing more than €2 million (£1.4m) and two and a half years into the technology required, Trooclick moved towards using quotes as a more comprehensive way of helping people find quality news.

Using natural language processing (NLP), Trooclick "crawls" news websites from around the world.

This technology automatically extracts quotes from what Motte calls "mainstream subjects", like Greek referendum, in both direct and indirect speech.


Screengrab of Trooclick's 'best article' feature.

"We have certain RSS feeds and trends that are coming into our system, which secrete the stories, but we do manually select the [topics] that we are interested in," said Paul Nolan, community manager at Trooclick.

At the moment, this process is only 80 per cent automated, which means the quotes still have to be manually verified and properly assigned to a speaker and subject.

Motte said it takes "approximately two minutes per quote for humans" to do this, which limits the number of topics Trooclick can cover in a day to 20, but he hopes the process will be fully automated in the coming months.

"Journalists are very important for us and none of this could happen without journalists, because to a certain extent we're an aggregator," said Trooclick community manager Paul Nolan.

He explained that Trooclick wants to "give a better quality story to the reader" by gathering as much information as possible on a topic and include quotes from experts in that field, whether they are journalists, academics or company employees.

The Trooclick website is currently in a beta version and, when accessing it, readers see how many quotes have been extracted so far (143,169) and the most recent stories.

A newly implemented feature is 'best article', where users are shown a selected number of articles on a particular topic, ranked according to quality and the number of speakers quoted.

Motte said the quality is determined by roughly 30 different criteria, such as the article's source, how well known the quoted speakers are and whether it is written in present or conditional tense.

We're trying to come up with a system where people and news are more accountable, everything is traceable and you can see who said something and understand why it's important in the bigger scheme of thingsPaul Nolan, Trooclick

"We want to improve the news space and we think that having a news service that can bring together lots of different sources and have a very objective view of what's going on is an improvement," Nolan told Journalism.co.uk.

Quoted speakers also have individual profile pages that feature short bios and their quote 'history', useful if readers want to check if a person has expressed similar or different views on another topic or in a different publication before.

Nolan and Motte said they want Trooclick to be "the Standard & Poor's of news", referencing the revered financial research firm, and use a set of criteria to help readers differentiate between branded content and quality news.

In the future, Trooclick aims to develop a plug-in that can be used directly on the platforms where people find and consume news, whether it's Twitter, Facebook or search engines.

"We realise there's a lot of competition out there and in the news space it's very hard to innovate and disrupt," added Nolan.

"We're trying to come up with a system where people and news are more accountable, everything is traceable and you can see who said something and understand why it's important in the bigger scheme of things."

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