Startups pivot; it’s part of the process. But how many startups pivot multiple times and still manage to raise significant cash from reputable investors? Sure, maybe it’s a sign of a bubble, a sign that startups are indeed overfunded, or maybe this company is just getting better with each successive effort.

We first covered NewsCred back in 2008, when they launched a credibility rating score for publishers, authors, and stories (by way of community voting plus algorithms) in an attempt to help readers filter the noise and find the highest quality news.

Early last year, NewsCred relaunched as a “Ning for newspapers”, allowing users to build custom online newspapers in minutes. Both approaches seemed to hold water, and the startup raised $750K in seed funding from FLOODGATE and IA Ventures last September in support of it new look.

However, neither model quite caught on, and the NewsCred of today has landed somewhere in the middle. Co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam says that two years of iterating and nail-biting has led to the team deciding to ditch its consumer site, reprioritizing its focus on the simple (if not ambitious) goal of reinventing the concept of a newswire service.

To do so, NewsCred is licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Guardian, WashPo, and The Economist, and charging customers to access its news API — and the premium content from those publishers.

Hopefully, the third try is the charm. And, hey, quite a few reputable investors are willing to bet that it will be. Today, the startup announced that it has landed $4 million in series A funding led by FirstMark, with participation from Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Advancit Capital, through Shari Redstone. (FLOODGATE and IA Ventures also reinvested.)

It’s a vote of confidence for the startup’s mission to reinvent the newswire and, in so doing, connect audiences with “the world’s best journalism”, says Islam. In its new B2B approach, NewsCred is looking to provide publishers and brands with fully licensed, full-text articles, photos, and videos from international newspapers to blogs and indy rags. The startup’s in-house editorial team filters and curates thousands of articles for each of its clients’ specific needs and interests, whether broad or niche. Through one platform, one license, and one bill, NewsCred is endeavoring to make it a breeze for publishers and brands to buy, manage, and increase revenue.

Along with its editorial team, the startup uses its API to filter and customize news articles by topic, location, language, sources, and date. Through its proprietary semantic and natural language processing technology, NewsCred curates 215K full-text articles from 700+ sources across 50 countries, in eight languages, all of which is organized into 20 categories, and 47K topics.

Islam says that the startup’s tech is platform agnostic, working on tablets, mobile, the Web, Facebook, etc and delivers content, images, and multimedia in XML, RSS, or JSON.

As to its revenue model? NewsCred chages a monthly API licensing fee to access its content, which is based on the volume of news stories as well as the sources licensed. All revenue received by the startup is then shared with content providers, and the CEO says that it is already paying some of its sources six-figures.

For journalists, this can be a great way to gain exposure and access to new distribution channels, while maintaining attribution, and grabbing a supplemental paycheck. For publishers looking to up their production to keep up with the content-spewing 24-hour digital news cycle, NewsCred’s access to a huge array of voices and its ability to customize content and create targeted editorial sections for niche audiences — along with the complementary advertising opportunities — could be appealing. Especially for publishers already pulling in a high volume of pageviews.

It’s true that consumers want access to a variety of competing views when consuming their digital content, and NewsCred certainly gives content providers and brands an opportunity to access quality journalism and provide their readers with just that, but news consumers are also wary of plain old RSS feeds, aggregators, rebloggers, syndicators, and the ilk. NewsCred can sidestep this with a big editorial team and feverish curation, but it could be a slippery slope.

A one-stop platform for publishers and content producers to gain supplemental content and revenue streams is no doubt appealing, and may just be where this is all going. As long as it doesn’t require another pivot. For more, check ‘em out at home here.

What do you think? Is NewsCred onto something?

Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.

We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted.

NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks.

NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).

NewsCred, the news aggregator that ranks stories by the credibility of their source, has launched to the public. Instead of relying on popularity as many social news sites do, NewsCred instead allows users to rate each story, author, and publication’s credibility, which is then plugged into an algorithm to determine the site’s prominent headlines.

We originally introduced the site last May when it launched in private alpha. Since then, NewsCred has implemented a number of new features, including a more thorough search, topic-specific pages, and a section for breaking news.

My biggest criticism when I first reviewed the site was the apparently weak implementation of the credibility algorithm, or even the viability of creating one in the first place. Credibility is very difficult to measure, and can often be misleading. News organizations that break news may be less accurate, as tips aren’t always reliable. But is a news source that simply rehashes established information really a better alternative? The site has responded to these issues, among others, by implementing its breaking news section and tweaking its algorithm, but it is still a work in progress.

Because the site has remained private until now, the credibility scores at launch aren’t particularly meaningful, which makes it hard to judge how effective the system will be. But even if the credibility rankings turn out to be ineffective, NewsCred could still be a success. The site offers a clean and intuitive news aggregator that will appeal to users who may not be fond of traditional RSS readers.

Similar offerings (that rely on different recommendation systems) include Regator and Socialmedian.

The internet is littered with people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Common sense is usually enough to separate the junk from legitimate articles, but even the most highly-regarded publications have been infiltrated by reporters who like to make things up. NewsCred, an international startup based out of Geneva and Stockholm, is trying to address this problem by assigning a credibility rating to every big-name publisher, author, and story.

The site is currently in a private alpha, and you can grab one of 1000 invites here.

Right now NewsCred behaves like a mix between a news aggregator and Digg. Users can pick from a number of major news sources to customize their main feeds, or they can sort sources by credibility. After clicking on a story, users can choose to either “Credit” or “Discredit” the author or the article itself. These ratings are averaged across all users to determine the trustworthiness of each article, author, and publication.

NewsCred’s biggest problem is going to involve establishing a meaningful reputation system dictated by “the crowd”. For one, the obvious issue of bias comes into play – there will be no shortage of people who discredit sources for simply disagreeing with them. Most people will respond to a story with a gut instinct of, “This seems stupid” instead of, “The facts presented in this article are false”.

The system also fails to take into account the nature of breaking news. The “most credible” source might be the one that sits on the sidelines for a few days while everyone else is talking to contacts and searching for facts. Rumormongers have no business being called “credible”, but there is something to be said for sources that break stories first. NewsCred should reflect this somehow.

NewsCred has a good idea. Both online blogs and the mainstream media are full of unsubstantiated rumors, biased articles, and unsourced facts. But a black-and-white voting system doesn’t seem to be the best way establish an author’s reputation – the system will rapidly devolve into little more than a popularity contest. In order to succeed, NewsCred will need to establish a robust rating system that encourages fact-based debate. Otherwise, it won’t have much credibility itself.

The image above is supposed to show the trustworthiness of mainstream media over time, but there isn’t much data yet.