https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570164/knewz-news-corp-aggregation-google-facebook

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News Corp gives up on its 'Knewz' aggregator after 18 months

It existed in opposition to alleged bias from Google and Facebook

By Ian Carlos Campbell@soupsthename Jul 9, 2021, 1:53pm EDT

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[Screen_Sho] Image: News Corp

Knewz, the news aggregation site created by Rupert Murdoch's News
Corp to attempt to gain some leverage against Google and Facebook's
control over what articles users read, is dead. The website, curated
by a mix of artificial intelligence and real breathing editors,
lasted just 18 months before shutting down, presumably because News
Corp began to get concessions from both Google and Facebook.

The garishly yellow front page of Knewz is gone, but you can still
see its farewell message (and a plug for other News Corp sites).
According to Knewz, it had provenance, "but not profits."

[Screen_Sho] Knewz' trusted news sources are News Corp entities.

Knewz tried to bill itself as a publisher-friendly aggregator,
pulling from sources big and small across the political spectrum. If
it had worked as promised, it would've favored original reporting
over quick news aggregation, shared data with publishers, and skipped
taking a cut of ad revenue. The problem was no one was reading the
news through Knewz, and according to The Columbia Journalism Review,
the site frequently defaulted to News Corp sources over other
publishers.

The timing for a Knewz shutdown makes sense, even if it seems to
shatter the illusion that News Corp was doing this for anyone other
than itself. Thanks to a law supported by the Australian Competition
and Consumer Commission -- on News Corp's home turf -- platforms like
Google and Facebook are forced to pay, and negotiate with, news
publishers to display their stories. This initially did not go down
well with either platform (Google threatened to pull its search
engine from Australia), but ultimately both Google and Facebook ended
up striking deals with News Corp. You don't need a weird and blunt
tool like Knewz when you can just get Australian regulators to force
people to pay you.

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