The beast is unleashed: looking at Tina Brown’s new site

As reported all over the shop, yesterday saw the launch of the online news aggregator site, The Daily Beast, captained by former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The NewYorker, Tina Brown, and backed by Barry Diller, of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

PaidContent had managed a sneak preview, but the likes of Roy Greenslade, and Journalism.co.uk had to wait till its official grand unveiling yesterday afternoon.

Named after the fictional tabloid in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, Tina Brown describes The Daily Beast, on her site, as: “the omnivorous friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a twist.”

Her motley crew boasts the satirist Chris Buckley, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s Laura Bennett and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg.

The site’s bold red and black design has a large list of contributors and features a collection of news, opinion, blogs, links and video.

Over at Cyber Journalist Net they reckon it’s ‘about 30 percent original content’ and Gawker is having fun speculating about Brown’s spending habits.

Opinion in the US seems to be split on the site: Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke thinks it ’sucks’, but as the New York Observer points out she said that about Huffington as well.

Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune reckons there’s irony in the choice of title but doesn’t think that necessarily matters.

With absolutely no advertising on the site, it will be interesting to see whether The Daily Beast can survive in the online jungle. It seems to have had a lion’s share of initial hype at least.

Tags: Barry Diller, Chicago Tribune, Chris Buckley, daily beast, Evelyn Waugh, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Laura Bennett, Mark McKinnon, Nikki Finke, online news aggregator site, Steve Johnson, Tatler, the New York Observer, Tina Brown

TechRadar.com: Japanese Yahoo lets users edit news page

Yahoo's Japanese-language news site is allowing users to submit and edit contributions. The idea is to create a wiki-style news section based on the expert knowledge of individual contributors. Full story...

Tags: Japan, news site, Yahoo

Pop + Politics: Where does aggregation stop and plagiarism start?

Journalists discuss the difference between good aggregation of news and when the practice becomes plagiarism. Full story...

Tags: plagiarism

An aggregation of aggregators: Journalism.me and Crowdstatus.com

Two new aggregation sites have been set up: Kiyoshi Martinez’s Journalism.me and Darren Stuart’s CrowdStatus.com.

Martinez, who is also responsible for Angy Journalist, is using the site to aggregate feeds from a host of bloggers, news sources, journalism job sites and training centres.

CrowdStatus.com lets a user specify a group or ‘crowd’ of Twitter users and then aggregates their updates on one page. It only works with Twitter at the moment, but Stuart plans to add Facebook updates and Seesmic vids.

On a completely different note (boom,boom!) for anyone who hasn’t come across JournalRhythm, it needs no more explanation than - it’s news to a beat…

Tags: Darren Stuart, Kiyoshi Martinez

Huffington Post introduces ‘Big News Pages’

The Huffington Post has created its own version of the BBC’s topic pages - HuffPost Big News Pages.

The pages will aggregate a mixture of HuffPost content alongside Digg and del.icio.us links, posts from other bloggers and relevant Twitter conversations.

There are 75 so far, but more will be added to meet reader demand, the site says.

Tags: BBC, Huffington Post

LOUD3R adds to network, sees 200,000 unique users

Niche online publisher LOUD3R is to launch a series of new sites, as part of its plans to create 10 new websites a month on its network.

The new additions include: PREGG3R, for pregnancy; SHUTT3R, for photography; and SUMM3R, for the Olympics.

The semantic engine automatically aggregates and filters multimedia content from a ’source list’ of websites selected by editors. A glossary of terms is created to teach the engine how to identify that content.

The existing network of 25 sites recorded 200,000 unique users over 30 days, according to a press release from the publisher.

Tags: LOUD3R, online publisher

Belgian newspaper group to take European Commission to court again after its first challenge over news aggregator fails

Belgian newspaper group Copiepresse – yes, the one that’s in that legal wrangle with Google – is about to re-enter a copyright battle with a second online publisher – this time it’s the European Commission.

Copiepresse will attempt to sue the EC for a second time after it had its copyright infringement case against the EC’s news aggregation services NewsBrief and NewsExplorer thrown out by a Belgian court.

The group took the case on the same grounds as its Google case, that the use of the material without newspapers’ permission was an infringement of their copyright.

According to Out-Law.com, Belgian press reports said the case was thrown out of the Court of Seizures in Belgium after a report produced for the court backed the Commission and because there was a jurisdictional problem with the case. Iy added that the group would not appeal against the throwing out of the case but would re-submit it to Belgium’s civil court.

Tags: Copiepresse, European Commission, google

Digg launches recommendation engine

Digg is launching a new recommendation engine – offering a first play with the new technology to a random sample of Digg users to test this week.

The beta device will analyse users past ‘Digging’ activity to uncover other users and content that may be of interest to them.

Digg intends to roll out the technology later on in the week to all users.

“The Recommendation Engine is a cool way to discover new content on Digg. Now that there are more than 16,000 stories submitted to the Upcoming section every day, it’s difficult to sort through everything to find the best content,” Digg founder Kevin Rose wrote on his blog.

“The Recommendation Engine uses your past digging activity to identify what we call Diggers Like You (who you can see on the right hand nav) to suggest stories you might like.”

Tags: Digg, Kevin Rose

The AP ‘beginning to fracture’ as members form collectives, reduce reliance

The Wall Street Journal wrote this week that the 162-year-old Associated Press (AP) is ‘beginning to fracture’ as the newspaper business in the US breaks up.

The AP last week announced a new set of ‘wire’ tools and cash back options to sweeten newspaper clients that are becoming disenchanted with the fees it demands and its increasing focus providing news and information packages for web publishing and non-traditional customers like Google and Yahoo.

However, its members have already started to seek alternatives to the AP for syndicating their stories and picking up relevant content for their publications from other news providers.

Journalism.co.uk detailed in April how eight of the largest newspapers in the US state of Ohio had begun bypassing the AP and forged an alliance to share their top stories.

The Columbus Dispatch, The Toledo Blade, the Cincinnati Enquirer, The Akron Beacon Journal, The Plain Dealer are amongst newspapers making up the membership of the Ohio News Organization (with the unfortunate acronym, OHNO).

Rather than relying to the Associated Press to decide at the end of each news day whether or not to distribute their stories, the papers now post content to private website - accessible only to those eight newsrooms - from which partner organisations will be able to select pieces to use and publish while the stories are still hot.

But it seems that OHNO is not alone in taking this kind of stance against the AP. According to the WSJ piece, Five Montana newspapers owned by the newspaper concern Lee Enterprises have also begun sharing content. In addition, editors in Texas, Pennsylvania and Indiana have inquired about how the Ohio cooperative works.

Tags: Associated Press, Ohio News Organization

Innovations in Journalism – socially referred and aggregated news from Yahoo! Buzz

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on.

You’ll know and use Digg and the geeks will be into Reddit - loving it now its gone open source - but there is another one worth looking at, and it’s a biggie. Welcome to IIJ, Yahoo! Buzz.

1. Who are you and what’s it all about
My name is Tapan Bhat and I am senior VP of Yahoo! Front Doors and Network Services.

Yahoo! Buzz beta is an extension to Yahoo.com that unites people with the most remarkable content from websites across the internet and brings the most “buzz-worthy” stories to the Yahoo! homepage.

It determines the most popular, must-read stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the web, with an approach that combines user votes with search popularity to determine a story’s Buzz ranking.

2. Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Yahoo! Buzz can be useful to journalists on multiple levels. It can provide increased exposure for your great content. The most popular stories also may be selected by our editorial team and featured on Yahoo.com.

In addition, Yahoo! Buzz offers valuable insight for anyone interested in what is buzzing about and looking for timely story ideas or resources.

3. Is this it or is there more to come?
After only three month in beta, Yahoo! Buzz receives around 8 million unique monthly visitors worldwide according to comScore.

We’ll continue to listen to the feedback from publishers and our users to make sure the site continues to find the most relevant and interesting content online.

Since launching with around 100 large and small publishers, we have gradually been adding new publishers to the beta program and now have around 300 publishers participating.

In the coming months, we’ll continue adding more participants and once Yahoo! Buzz is generally available any publisher will be able to participate.

Looking ahead, Yahoo! Buzz will form the basis for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers.  We’ll develop this ecosystem by building out unique new syndication and monetisation tools that help publishers share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. Over time, we expect this to extend into a powerful content exchange that connects owners of content with distributors of traffic.

4. Why are you doing this?
While the homepage has always featured engaging stories and content, our editors could only scratch the surface before. With Buzz we can add more depth to the front page by bubbling up the best content from around the web, as indicated by users.

In addition, it creates a comprehensive, categorised database of content from across the web that can eventually make the Yahoo! network better.

5. What does it cost to use it?
Yahoo! Buzz is entirely free to use.

6. How will you make it pay?
As mentioned earlier, our primary goal is to further Yahoo!’s leadership position as the best starting point on the web and offering more relevant content brings people coming back to Yahoo! again and again.

During the beta process for Yahoo! Buzz, we will also be finalising our monetisation approach, including ways in which we may give prominent promotion to content from Yahoo! partners when appropriate.

Tags: monetisation tools, search popularity, Tapan Bhat, Yahoo