MARK Devlin and his partner Mary set up Newslines to tackle the spread of incorrect information in the media in 2014 – a time before the term “fake news” was widely used. The social news network was set up when the couple were running English magazines and a current affairs website in Japan. They wanted to launch a service which offers an unbiased timeline of events or people.

Name: Mark Devlin

Age: 51

Position: CEO and founder

WHAT’S YOUR BUSINESS CALLED?

Newslines

WHERE IS IT BASED?

Glasgow

WHY DID YOU SET UP THE BUSINESS?

THE idea for Newslines came out of a fact checking project we had before. The problem was we couldn’t keep track of the timeline of events. Looking at the order in which things happened can give a more accurate overview of a story or topic. I’m from Glasgow but in 1989 I moved to Japan. I set up a free magazine called Metropolis and it became Japan’s number one English magazine. I ran it for 14 years with my partner. In 2000 I set up japantoday.com, the No. 1 news and discussion site about Japan in English. In 2007 we sold that businesses and moved to the US where we ran a private karaoke room business. We moved back to Glasgow in 2016 and that’s when we really got Newslines off the ground. We got some investment for the business initially but we are looking for large scale investment now.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

AT the moment we have a mailing list. Our aim is to summarise all of the world’s news – past to present. We distribute our news through partners, such as social media fan pages and share advertising revenues with the page owners.

People can sign up to be the next set of contributors. They tell us what they are interested in and we help them produce a timeline along the way. Anyone can come in for free and read the timeline or edit it.

HOW DO YOU ENSURE PEOPLE EDITING THE SITE AREN’T SPREADING FAKE NEWS?

THERE’S a set of rules people have to follow and they must strip out the bias in reporting or it doesn’t go online.

HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM COMPETING BUSINESSES?

WE take parts of daily newspapers, Facebook and Wikipedia. All of this is combined to create a new kind of product. We try to build up a timeline. Facebook used to do a lot of news but now its model has changed where do people go for unbiased news? People can get a left-wing view in the Guardian and a right-wing view if they read the Telegraph but where is the unbiased reference point?

WHAT IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?

EVERYONE. If anyone has an interest in any news topic they can use the service to record history. The most complete news topic we have is of the UFC fighter Conor McGregor. We have 2000 news summaries on him making it the most complete news source of him in the world. People’s understanding of how the media works is much better than before and they can identify media bias better. The idea is that we collect news on a topic and strip it of all bias. It’s basically Wikipedia for news. People are more aware of fake news and are looking for news sources with less bias in them but that’s really hard to find.

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT RUNNING THE BUSINESS?

NEWS is always exciting but I love the idea of creating unbiased news reference. We are trying to figure out how to grow, use new technology and raise more money and I enjoy the challenge. One of the challenges is to get more people involved and get people to build up Newslines about different people. If people want to find out about something they might go to Wikipedia but Wikipedia doesn’t have all the information. We want to get more people involved – famous people, business people, etc can build up a timeline on that topic.

WHERE DO YOU HOPE THE BUSINESS WILL BE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME?

IN 10 years we aim to have a global news archive everyone can reference. At the moment all the news is in one place but we want to make it global and people could use it to make all kinds of news applications.

We also want to have our own crypto currency to grow the business. We use blockchain technology as the foundation of the business.