News Corp. shutters Knewz aggregator after 18 months

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Oh, Knewz we hardly knew you.

News Corp. pulled the plug on the news aggregator site after just 18 months.

The site was created in response to practices by tech giants such as Google and Facebook that published alleged made it hard for their content to pop up in newsfeeds or searches — and aggregating content from third party publishers without any compensation or other considerations.

News Corp. owns major content generators including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The U.S. Sun and MarketWatch through its Dow Jones division, and all of these sites were listed on the site’s farewell message.

Knewz also pulled in content from other sources in an attempt to present multiple viewpoints of the news, including smaller publishers. It leveraged a combination of computer technology and human editors to determine sources, but many times the site ended up favoring News Corp.’s own properties, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

The site, which combined a text heavy homepage with screamer-style typography perhaps inspired by its Sun and New York Post properties, along with an eye-catching shade of yellow, is now showing a “Knewz is no more” message starting in July 2021.

The shutdown’s timing comes as an Australian law requires news platforms such as Google and Facebook’s services, to negotiate with and pay news publishers to include their content.

Google first responded to the law by threatening to pull its search tools out of the country altogether.

In the end, Google and Facebook ended up striking up an agreement with News Corp. that apparently rendered Knewz obsolete.