This Is The Future of News? Really?

I didn't see the promise in Newser.com, Michael Wolff's nascent news-aggregation site, when it first soft-launched last month, and I can't say I do now after reading Wolff's 3,200-word brief for it in the new issue of Vanity Fair. (Or maybe that should be "3,200 page ad for it." Thanks, Graydon!)

Wolff's problem is that the internet has so far failed to serve up the perfect news-delivery system: one that tells you everything you need to know, along with all the entertaining and quirky stuff you'd want to know, if you knew it was out there to know about. His ideal system would combine aggregation with filtration -- ie. knowing about all the stories in existence, but only showing you the ones you want to see. And it would do even more than that. It would allow the user to scuba dive effortlessly through layers upon layers of meta-information: what's going on, how it's being covered, what are the patterns in who's reading it, etc.

That's an awfully tall order. Fortunately, Wolff has a secret weapon: algorithms! Algorithms that weight the relative importance of various stories by how many other people are reading them. And human operators who can override the algorithms, when necessary, to call attention to something that the hive-mind has missed.

After that grandiose build-up, I suspect you'll be disappointed, as I was, when you actually visit Newser.com. It's...well, it's a news site. There are some nice things to say about it: It doesn't overwhelm you with too many links, as the Huffington Post does. It's certainly snappier in design than the Drudge Report, though that's not hard. (Unlike either of those sites, it doesn't have a recognizable point of view.) It's pretty configurable (for instance, those scroll-over pop-up windows disappear for good if you want them to.) And it's only in beta right now, so presumably it'll be more impressive when it officially launches next month.

Still, it seems an awful lot like the "habituating, slightly fetishistic, more or less entertaining experience that defines a broad common interest" that Wolff defines as "the news." The same "the news" that he tells us "is ending."