Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Newser

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Headquarters
  
United States

President
  
Kate Seamons

Founder(s)
  
Michael Wolff

CEO
  
Patrick Spain

Type of site
  
News aggregation website

Founded
  
October 2007; 9 years ago (2007-10)

Newser is an American news site. It was founded in 2007 by journalist/media pundit Michael Wolff and businessman Patrick Spain, the former CEO of HighBeam Research and Hoover’s.

Contents

Newser’s president and editor-in-chief is Kate Seamons, formerly of the Chicago Sun-Times, who joined the site in 2007 as managing editor. She was promoted when founding editor-in-chief Caroline Miller left the organization at the end of August 2010 and became president in December 2012.

History

Newser launched in October 2007 at a party at New York’s Waverly Inn and was lauded as "Drudge-like" and "innovative."

Newser’s tagline, “Read Less, Know More” embodies the idea behind the site’s creation. The website utilizes human-powered aggregation; its staff of editors and writers curate approximately 45 stories each day and present them in a two paragraph, multiple source format.

In February 2009, The New York Times threatened legal action against Newser for trademark infringement and posting a photograph without permission. Newser removed the photograph in question, calling its publication an editor’s mistake.

In June 2009, Newser received $2.5 million in first-round funding, mainly from a collection of individual investors.

In April 2010, The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman accused Newser of not providing sufficient links or credit to original sources.

Michael Wolff was named editorial director of AdweekMedia on October 4, 2010, a position he held for a year. Patrick Spain stepped down as CEO on October 18, 2010 but returned to the role in March 2012 following Newser CEO Elisabeth DeMarse’s move to TheStreet.

In 2011, Newser was in talks to purchase and merge with Salon.com, but the deal ultimately fell through.

Features

User interaction is handled by several third-party widgets including ShareThis, AddThis, and the Disqus commenting widget.

"Newser by Users" was a feature from 2010 to 2012, which allowed users to write and upload stories directly to the Newser website without editorial review.

"Off The Grid" was an occasional Newser blog by founder Michael Wolff that was written between 2008 and 2010.

Site statistics

Newser traffic has been described as low quality referrals from traffic exchanges.

Quantcast traffic statistics for Newser, October 2016:

  • 1.5M unique visitors (US)
  • .4M unique visitors (Rest of World)
  • Compete Site Analytics traffic statistics for Newser, September 2016:

  • 1,674,298 unique visitors (US)
  • References

    Newser Wikipedia