News Corp Launchs A News App To Fight Against Google and Facebook

News Corp recently revealed their current progress to build a news aggregation service that would probably address stumbling blocks on the news industry. There’ve long been concerns that Google News, Facebook, and other digital platforms discriminate between different news sources when linking to certain articles. Such business scheme leads to an inadequate payment for publishers, as well as the advertising revenue diminishment.  

How would News Corp address the problem?

As said, News Corp was planning to launch two services including a mobile app and a website, both called Knewz.com. An early version has been released under the inspection of the company’s executives to facilitate the official launch which might take place later this year. For sources, Knewz.com will aggregate news from multiple sites such as The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Besides national outlets, individual publishers and local newspapers are also under consideration. 

Unlike the business practices offered by current platforms, the service would link the articles directly to sources, in the meantime not taking any share of publishers’ ad revenues. As sources are concerned over discrimination between subscription and non-subscription sites, News Corp promises to treat them fairly, while managing to share users data with publishers. Interestingly, the company aims to create original reports rather than those rehashing the existing articles. 

That said, Google News or Facebook was supposed to degrade certain types of outlets including publishers with conservative readers. However, Knewz.com remains giving exposure to them as an attempt to promote “deserving” news stories. That means progressive news site like ThinkProgress will not be excluded. 

News Corp’s ambition for Knewz.com

News Corp said their goal when developing the service was to adequately reward the provenance of journalism. Within a broader scale, this move seems like one of News Corp’s efforts to attain more advantage over other platforms. 

While the advertising-sales plan has been set ready for Knewz.com, the experienced manpower is considered an indispensable factor. The company will make use of both software and human curation to pick up articles among a variety of publications.