Washington Post launches social media enabled news aggregation site

Curation and aggregation of news on the web is one of the most contentious topics in online media today. On Wednesday, the Washington Post Co. launched a news aggregation website called “Trove” that allows readers to customise the news around their interests.

“Trove creates a customised news experience that factors in a reader’s likes and dislikes, combining state-of-the-art technology with expertise from the newsroom,” the Post Co. said in a statement.

Trove.com, which claims over 10 000 news sources including leading media outlets, also incorporates social media with a “Comments” feature that lets users connect with others with similar interests.

Users can also create their own customised news “channels” to display news stories about a particular interest.

“Because Trove is all about the individual user, the experience is customised and different for everyone,” Post Co. chief digital officer Vijay Ravindran said in a statement.

Trove uses Facebook Connect to pull in a user’s interests from their Facebook profile to begin building a personalised experience.

It features an “Editors’ Picks” selection of news of the day chosen by the site’s editorial team.

Trove is available for desktop computers but also Android and Blackberry devices. The Post Co. said iPhone and iPad applications were coming soon.

Faced with a steady decline in print advertising revenue and circulation, US newspaper publishers have been conducting a number of free and paid experiments on the Web.

The Washington Post Co. is also a partner with The News York Times and USA Today publisher Gannett in an online subscription-based news service called Ongo which launched last year.

The Washington Post was also among the signatories of a letter last month accusing iPad news reader Zite of copyright infringement.

Zite offers a customized and personalized news experience, displaying stories based on the interests and behavior of a particular user. – AFP