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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Newser is a news agreggator founded by Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff.

The site uses an algorithm to determine the most talked-about stories and displays them in the form of a grid of photos. About 15 writers and editors produce short summaries of the stories, which link to the original sources.

Since its launch in August 2007, Newser and other aggregators have been accused of misappropriating content from traditional news sites, most notably from web entrepreneur Mark Cuban and from the entertainment site The Wrap. The site is ad-supported, and became profitable in 2009.

In February 2011, merger talks between Newser and Salon collapsed. The deal is said to have fallen through over price, and Salon.com subsequently took itself off the market.

Video:

Michael Wolff discussing Newser’s desire to “kill newspapers”:

Peers, allies, & competitors:

Google, Salon, Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

Nov. 4, 2010 / Ken Doctor

The Newsonomics of Kindle Singles — Maybe the newspaper is like the old LP — you know, as in "Long Play." It may be a 33 1/3, though it seems like it came out of the age of 78s sometimes, a relic of the post-Victorian Victrola age. It is what it is, a wo...

June 3, 2010 / Jeff Israely

Jeff Israely: The line between “content” and “journalism,” and deciding which side I want to be on — [Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a “new global news website.” He details his experience as a new news entrepreneur at his site, b...

June 1, 2010 / C.W. Anderson

Aggregators, curators, and indexers: There’s a difference, and it matters — Aggregation. Curation. Indexing. They’re all the same, aren’t they? Ask any serious online journalist or new media entrepreneur, and the answer will be quick and obvious: of course not! But in the public deba...

Aug. 21, 2009 / Zachary M. Seward

Why did Newser’s traffic fall off a cliff? — Michael Wolff, whose two-year-old site, Newser, is frequently cited as a model for the future of journalism, titled a typically provocative blog post yesterday, “I’m Proud to Kill the News.” He made the...

Aug. 14, 2009 / Zachary M. Seward

Who, really, is The Associated Press accusing of copyright infringement? — The Associated Press document we posted yesterday is in line with the consortium’s most bellicose rhetoric on copyright. It begins, “The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndica...

All Lab posts on Newser »

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

All Mediagazer posts on Newser »

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 12, 2011.

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