Newser

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Newser is an online news site that aggregates news information from over 100 sources and then writes summaries of articles from these sources. It was launched in October 2007 and is run by Highbeam Research, Inc. CEO Patrick Spain, Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, and Caroline Miller, former editor-in-chief of New York Magazine. The company is a branch of Highbeam Research, Inc., which owns one of the largest news databases in the world.


URL	newser.com
Type of site	News
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Highbeam Research, Inc.
Launched	October 2007
Current status	Active

1 Content
2 Design
3 Features
4 Traffic
5 Reception
6 External Links
7 References

[edit] Content

The main goal of Newser is to summarize the top stories from around the world so that readers can get all the news they need in a quick, timely format. According to the home page,

Newser gives you more news in less time. We search for the best and most important stories all over the web, read them for you, and deliver concise and sharp summaries—along with links to the full text. Newser provides a way to stay on top of an ever-expanding horizon of news and opinion—politics, sports, business, trends, technology, personalities, crimes, and controversies. Newser keeps you not just better informed, but, with our signature graphic interface and smart condensed format, more enjoyably informed.^[1]

The most popular news source is the Associated Press, followed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and The Washington Post. Along with these and other major news sources, Newser also uses many lesser-known sources, such as local news websites.

[edit] Design

Newser uses a grid that displays multiple stories and allows a user to scroll over each news item for a quick summary. From there, the user can click to read more or read the entire news story from the source. A user can customize the grid to show either hard or soft news. Hard news focuses on financial, political, and world events, while soft news shows stories about arts and living, gossip, and movie news. Furthermore, a user can choose how many stories he or she wants to see on the grid, ranging from nine stories to twenty-one, by using the toggle located at the top of the page.

The grid was created because Newser believes that the world wide web is best experienced visually ^[2]. The inspiration for the grid comes from the popular TV game show, Hollywood Squares. Newser's home page blends the three main ways that news is delivered on the Web: top down traditional editorial (e.g., The New York Times and CNN), machine aggregated (e.g., Google News) and user recommended news (e.g., NewsVine and Digg).

[edit] Features

Newser is an interactive site. Users can post comments about all stories. They can also compete for Newser Points. Users earn points based on how much they use the site, whether it be reading stories or publishing what the site calls Threads. Threads are topic pages that a user can create based on a subject. Examples of popular threads are Celebrities Misbehaving, Pakistan at the Crossroads, and Election 2008. Users compile stories about their subject using Newser and other sources. A user can post YouTube videos, pictures, and stories from news sites around the world.

[edit] Traffic

Traffic on Newser has grown since its launch. As of May 2008, Newser hosts over 350,000 unique visitors per month^[3], and visitors view over 2,000,000 pages per month.

[edit] Reception

Newser has been the topic of extensive blogging, mainly because the site is a radical departure from typical news sites. The New York Times’s Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, said the site “looks like one of the best I’ve seen.”^[4] PaidContent.org wrote that the site “helps in efficient news consumption.”^[5] Furthermore, Harrison Hoffman of News.com said that Newser “has a very slick design, and the news is presented really well. The concept for content selection is pretty good too.”^[6] But he notes that Newser does not use blogs for their stories, and, according to Hoffman, “you have to embrace new media, at least to some extent.” Furthermore, Gawker.com has not been too positive about the site, and Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio magazine has been critical of Newser spokesman, Michael Wolff.^[7].