BizJournals Portfolio
Feb 12 2008 12:00am EDT

Wolff on Newser Launch: 'Completely on Plan'

For a would-be internet mogul twice over, Michael Wolff is not quite as tech savvy as you'd think.

I emailed the Vanity Fair media columnist yesterday to find out how Newser.com, his smart news aggregator, has been faring since its October launch. Wolff evidently meant to forward my message to Patrick Spain, CEO of Highbeam Research and Wolff's partner in Newser, but accidentally hit "reply" instead. After the jump, his suggested talking points. (I figured I'd cut out the middleman.)

Wolff's errant message to Spain:

Should we do this? If so, I think you should say something like...

1) After 3 months, at 300,000 uniques--fastest growing news site, etc;
2) Will reach 1 million by summer; 2 million by year end;
3) Goal is to be among top news sites in 24 months;
4) Have just launched user-created threads, so any user can build a clip file about any event, or personality, or controversy, or trend, or product--like a Wiki entree, but based on news sources; essentially gives users the ability to curate news from their own perspective...
A. He'll ask how many have used this--so we need an aggressive anwser
5) We have further customization features coming online very soon.

There you have it. Oh, and Wolff also told me on the phone that Newser's progress has been "fabulous. Terrific. Everything is completely on plan, so knock on wood." And in case you're still wondering how its traffic stacks up against the competition, here's a chart from Compete.com plotting it against the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.


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