Today, the news world gets its first true, native online news brand blending the best of editorially curated and machine-aggregated news "” Newser.
Newser (www.newser.com), combining editorial savvy and a proprietary story-selection formula, debuted today at the Future of Business Media conference in New York. On a 24-7 basis, Newser locates and links to the best and most up-to-date news stories, video, audio and photos from vast news resources across the Web "” and supplies concise, punchy summaries.
Newser is a collaboration of HighBeam Research and Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair columnist and author of the Internet classic, "Burn Rate." Caroline Miller, the former editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, is Newser's founding editor and serves as Newser's editor-in-chief.
HighBeam CEO Patrick Spain said, "Technology-driven news engines that collect hundreds, even thousands, of stories deliver massive amounts of redundant, unedited and overwhelming news. Michael Wolff came to us with an innovative vision of combining traditional editorial sensibilities with search and filtering technology that would deliver a better, faster, smarter and more entertaining news experience."
Wolff said, "What the network evening news was to television, what 24-7 news was to cable, Newser is to the Web "” the first Web-only news source that selects, edits and digests all of the Web's news feeds in a smart and entertaining way."
Miller added, "Our mission is to combine aggregation and intelligence. We aim to pull together the most important and compelling news, ideas and voices from all over the Web, and present them in a sharp, efficient format that's just irreverent enough to cut through the clutter."
Newser, which has been in public beta, launches with new features and improved navigation. Spain commented, "We read the hundreds of comments and watched the tens of thousands of users who tried out Newser. Then we built the site they told us, by their words and actions, that they wanted."
For example, early feedback about Newser indicated that users would like tools to better filter news. Newser's product team responded by developing news filters "” the first of which to launch is a "hard-soft" slider bar, allowing users to adjust their news stream from light to serious news.
In addition to filters, Newser offers the following features:
- 24-7 STORY SELECTION "” A proprietary story selection formula brings together the preferences of online news readers, the top 100 online news sources and Newser's own editors. The methodology measures the ubiquity of coverage by the top-ranked English-language news sites, the prominence with which those sites feature the stories, and the popularity of a given story with readers.
- STORY SUMMARIES "” Editors find the best coverage, select the best sources for each story and distill them efficiently into lively summaries.
- ADD-IN VIDEO, AUDIO AND LINKS "” The story is then matched with a deep and rich set of images, video and text links that provide a larger context and a further search path.
- TOPIC THREADS "” Because the backstory is frequently as important as the story itself, Newser created tools that allow its editors and, very soon, readers to develop threads of stories around topics of interest to them. For example, Newser offers threads on Space: Final FrontierElection 2008" "” as well as the ever-popular Celebs Misbehaving."
- WIDGETS "” Widgets for iGoogle, RSS feeds, and alerts, plus tools allow users to post Newser news to Facebook, del.icio.us, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, etc.
- ARCHIVE "” Newser leverages the HighBeam Library archive of 50 million articles to offer both a deeper news context (access not just to today's news, but to all news "” so users can follow a topic, a theme, a trend) and a platform for searching branded, authoritative content.
The development of Newser was the subject of Wolff's column in the October issue of Vanity Fair. "Every advance in technology," writes Wolff, "has seen the invention of a new form of news. Linotype got us mass circulation newspapers 125 years ago; television, the network evening news 60 years ago; cable, 24-7 satellite news 25 years ago. So what's Internet news "” what's the new news thing?"
He goes on to ask: "What if you could become the Amazon of news? The Google of news?"
Newser, Wolff said, means to be the dominant online news brand.
About HighBeam Research, Inc.
HighBeam Research, Inc., headquartered in Chicago, operates three online services designed to meet the needs of information-hungry individuals: the award-winning subscription-based HighBeam Library (www.highbeam.com) that enables individuals to access 50 million proprietary newspaper magazine and journal articles from 3,500 sources; HighBeam Encyclopedia (www.encyclopedia.com), a leading provider of free reference content from Columbia University, Britannica, Oxford University Press and others; and Newser (www.newser.com), an innovative news service that combines human and machine intelligence to present news from across the Internet in a visually attractive and easily accessible format.
