Newser adds new features
Jinfo Blog

17th June 2008

Item

There are lots of news services out there, and a few manage and present their content in interesting ways. I’ve liked Newser http://www.newser.com/ for some time now because of its grid structure of news stories from a good range of publications and media sources. It has added some new features that I think you might like to try. First up is the ‘New York Times in 60 seconds’, where Newser’s editorial staff have picked some of the key stories and summarised them in their own grid, which, it is claimed, can be read in 60 seconds. Next, key stories from other sources are in a ‘must read’ space on a newly added second line navigation bar. You might think the Glossies section is not so critical to business research but this is where you find stories from Time, Newsweek, and Forbes. Finally, the Pundits grid is the analysis and commentary section of the site. If you use news threads the site now lets you rate them. Threads of the main news stories have been moved to the right hand side of the home page. One of the nice features on the site is the ability to change the local weather and news grid to a local city. I chose London: however once I moved to the page itself it didn’t have the same look and feel as the main pages. Perhaps this section will be revamped in a future upgrade. Newser is brainchild of Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff, who was concerned that no news service was native to the online medium. The service was created by HighBeam Research as an extension of its existing online information business and uses the HighBeam technology platform. HighBeam also offers HighBeam Library, a subscription service to about 5,000 newspapers, magazines, journals, radio and TV transcripts, and reference works http://www.highbeam.com/. HighBeam Encyclopedia http://www.encyclopedia.com/ is an advertising-supported, free-to-the-user service containing reference articles from Columbia University, Britannica, and Oxford University Press. It also has more than 3 million free newspaper and magazine articles to supplement the reference material.

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