Growing trend of sites mine for news gold

April 26, 2011 - PRLog -- WATERTOWN, Mass. — Imagine you arrive at the largest amusement park ever built that has 20,000 rides, and you only have time to go on 20. Would you pick them at random, hoping to go on the good ones? Or would you want to hear from a team of people who went on them already and can recommend 100 of the best?

Every day over 20,000 news articles are published, and at the first tick of the day, the public hasn’t read any of them. Many are inaccurate or biased, many leave out key information, and many are poorly written. Too many are just not worth even a minute of time.

To deal with this problem, several new sites — commonly referred to as aggregators or curators — have emerged that specialize in culling the pearls from the murky oyster bed of online news. One of these, DailySource, is unique in that it blends a team of veteran journalists who were formerly lead editors at major news organizations with several dozen citizen journalist volunteers. Their team includes the former lead editor of the front page of the New York Times’ website, the former operating editor of the Christian Science Monitor’s website, and the former Executive Director of the Online News Association.

It’s also a nonprofit organization running on donations and grants, similar to NPR. The site is primarily focused on hard news, but includes sections of the best viral videos, lighthearted news, op-ed pieces, a daily quote and live chats.

According to research from the Pew Research Center in 2010, 70 percent of people find that “the amount of news and information available from different sources today is overwhelming."

“In the early days of the Internet, people were happy just to be able to read news on the Internet,” said Peter Dunn, founder and executive director of DailySource. “Next came things like Google News and RSS readers that let us access huge amounts of stories in one place. The problem was, ‘Who has the time to pour through all of that? Why do I want to spend the day going through the garbage looking for good things — I want the good stuff right away and without tons of effort.’ Naturally sites like ours have come along to serve that need.

“Even if a regular person were to pick the best items from the top 10 sites, the result would be better than any one of the sites on its own. In our case, we cull hundreds of the top sites, and we have a large team of trained people doing it around the clock.”

Dunn said “news curators or selectors” are more apt terms for DailySource and similar sites than calling them aggregators. “Aggregation implies collecting large quantities into a total of the items — putting everything in one place. Google News is an aggregator. We specifically avoid doing that. We select the best and throw away the rest.”

While most news curators focus on a single topic, DailySource focuses on all topics. It’s like a normal news site where a person can see all the major news for every topic at a glance. But instead of only seeing items from one website, readers see items from a range of sites. “Most news readers still want to go to a site where they will see the top news stories of that day,” said Managing Editor Lynne Adams. “They venture to several topic-centric sites and blogs, and also visit an all-topics site to make sure they see the big stories of the day.”

As the level of sensationalism in the media rises and every other article is about celebrity scandal, the need for sites to separate the wheat from the chaff grows. “A lot of the media seems to have become addicted to celebrity gossip coverage,” said Adams, who used to head a team of 30 journalists covering international and national news at the BBC. “We offer such things occasionally so people will know what’s going on if a sizeable scandal occurs, but a celebrity doing run-of-the-mill, idiotic things is old news and we don't give it daily coverage.”

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DailySource.org, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the public, delivers news, columns, editorials, photos, videos and more hand-picked from hundreds of sites around the Internet daily for free.