Post by LFC on Jul 13, 2021 21:18:55 GMT
Rupert Murdoch tried to create and run a news aggregation site. It didn't do well.
In August of 2019, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp announced that it was developing Knewz, its own "conservative friendly" alternative to Google News. Knewz went live without much fanfare in January of 2020, and officially died today, less than eighteen months later.
What was Knewz?
Knewz described itself as "an innovative service designed to let you consume news from a wide variety of sources, free of the bias bubbles and vacuous verticals that frustrate so many discerning readers and thoughtful publishers." The service was operated by News Corp, the Murdoch-owned company behind Fox News, the New York Post, the Sun, and the Wall Street Journal.
In practice, Knewz was a news aggregator, somewhat similar to Google News. It used AI algorithms to scrape content from hundreds of news sources, with human editors to "highlight a selection of headlines that provide a broad perspective." The site's design was particularly garish, with construction-project-yellow headers, an inconsistently sized tile layout, and frequent use of boldface, underlining, and italics in the same headline.
What was Knewz?
Knewz described itself as "an innovative service designed to let you consume news from a wide variety of sources, free of the bias bubbles and vacuous verticals that frustrate so many discerning readers and thoughtful publishers." The service was operated by News Corp, the Murdoch-owned company behind Fox News, the New York Post, the Sun, and the Wall Street Journal.
In practice, Knewz was a news aggregator, somewhat similar to Google News. It used AI algorithms to scrape content from hundreds of news sources, with human editors to "highlight a selection of headlines that provide a broad perspective." The site's design was particularly garish, with construction-project-yellow headers, an inconsistently sized tile layout, and frequent use of boldface, underlining, and italics in the same headline.
Why shutter Knewz now?
The farewell message at knewz.com today simply says, "We certainly had provenance, but no profits," and offers a selection of links to "some of the world's most trusted news sites"—all of which are News Corp-owned outlets—including (bizarrely) realtor.com and mansionglobal.com. But there may have been another key factor in the timing of Knewz' closure.
In February 2021, News Corp reached an agreement with Google in which the search giant would provide "significant payments" to continue sourcing headlines from News Corp owned outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the Sun, and the Wall Street Journal.
With a financial agreement with Google locked down and operational, the Murdoch-owned site may have simply outlived its most important purpose.
The farewell message at knewz.com today simply says, "We certainly had provenance, but no profits," and offers a selection of links to "some of the world's most trusted news sites"—all of which are News Corp-owned outlets—including (bizarrely) realtor.com and mansionglobal.com. But there may have been another key factor in the timing of Knewz' closure.
In February 2021, News Corp reached an agreement with Google in which the search giant would provide "significant payments" to continue sourcing headlines from News Corp owned outlets including Fox News, the New York Post, the Sun, and the Wall Street Journal.
With a financial agreement with Google locked down and operational, the Murdoch-owned site may have simply outlived its most important purpose.
