My biggest criticisms of Google News are:<p>1) low signal-to-noise ratio - i.e., lots of duplicative stories, publishers are commoditized, and there are no mechanisms to distinguish (and reward!) high quality content<p>2) paywalls and/or extreme ad loads lurking everywhere<p>3) local news is a second-class citizen<p>4) lack of user control in customizing topics, while at the same time all the (uncontrollable) targeted "for you" stories tend to overfit (e.g., Google seems to think tech news and the Patriots are all I care about)<p>In general I'm extremely dissatisfied with the functionality of available news products and with the consequences of attention-optimized digital news media on our world. There's a lot of data which indicates most people feel some degree of similarly [1][2][3][4] and I think there's opportunity and demand for creating better.<p>As such, last summer I set out to build Gatherscope - a news ecosystem designed from first principles to serve readers and sustain quality journalism. At the moment, the high-level plan is:<p>1) build an aggregator layer that's differentiated in the breadth, depth, quality, and customizability of content that's surfaced and in applying machine clustering and summarization to make it faster and easier for busy consumers to digest what current events are happening, see varying perspectives about them, go deeper where worthwhile, and then get on with their lives<p>2) stack other layers around this - either by building them or through 3rd party relationships - to further deliver a rich, insightful, frictionless UX (e.g., bundled multi-publisher subscriptions, community quality review, synthesized audio, contextual search and feedback loops, publisher tools for local journalists)…these should all work independently but best together<p>Today there's a (quite-rough) MVP of part 1 live at <a href="https://www.gatherscope.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.gatherscope.com</a> and a very long way to go :)<p>All this to say: if any of this sounds interesting and/or you have strong, thoughtful opinions about news media, I'd love to hear from you. I've recently begun a hunt for collaborators, and even if that's not for you it would be good to hear how to build you a useful product faster.<p>Cheers,<p>Rob<p>[1] <a href="http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-findings-2018/" rel="nofollow">http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-fi...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-unbiased-news-coverage-but-are-divided-on-whether-their-news-media-deliver/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-un...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-employment-dropped-nearly-a-quarter-in-less-than-10-years-with-greatest-decline-at-newspapers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-emp...</a>