News surrounds most every American, be it a 24-hour news channel, a tabloid left on a coffee table, or tweets the Associated Press sends to a beloved iPhone. A common debate taking place in society today revolves around how to make sure that everything presented as news is news? Early this January, a website launched to help decide just that.
Newsnotnews.net (NNN) was created by John Burroway, Matt Casey, Leanard Mack (one of the creators of TweetsbyAnon), and John Tyler. Its purpose is simple- be a one-stop shop for people who want to read news that they think matters. To decide what news is important, NNN pulls the most-viewed stories from top news websites and allows their readers to vote on their importance on a scale of one to ten, one being the least newsworthy, and ten being the most.
Then, readers can prioritize what they want to read based on the overall “newsiness” of the story. The website features the most newsworthy and least newsworthy stories, as well as a rating on how the major news organizations are doing.
The website had humble beginnings.
“I was at work at Domino’s Pizza, and I had been listening to talk radio, and a story was on, and for the life of me I could not figure out why they were covering it,” Tyler said. “It grew off of that. It grew off of a need to prioritize news.”
Mack echoed Tyler’s sentiments.
“A lot of news is based on views, not ratings. With this website, we’ll be able to tell what the top stories and the top news agencies are each year. We could even tell what keyword had the most hits, be it Obama or Bieber,” Mack said.
Tyler and Mack realize that when it comes to the topic of what news agencies are more newsworthy than others, biases may come into play.
“We have technology in place [to block spam voting]. We don’t require registration or anything; we want our website to be very accessible,” Mack said.
“A key idea was placing the most-read sites for news readership all in one place. The New York Times is next to the Wall Street Journal. Fox is next to MSNBC. By placing the reader in that environment, you allow them to expand the coverage of what they’re reading,” Tyler said.
NNN isn’t cutting into the profits of any major news sites. When you click on a story, it will link you to the actual story from the website it was pulled from, be it the Los Angeles Times or the Columbus Dispatch. Nothing is changed except for the addition of a voting bar to judge the story’s newsworthiness.
“We’re hoping that people will come to our website first. We want to become the source for news. We don’t change the stories in any way. If an ad appears on CNN’s version of the story, it’ll be on ours,” Mack said.
Besides their own website, NNN is also on Facebook and Twitter. Following newsnotnews@twitter will garner the subscriber tweets on the top and bottom stories of the day.
“We want to take this out of our hands and let the people decide,” Tyler said. “This website is driven by the reader and their input. Newsnotnews.net will continue to create a product that serves the prospect of news accessibility.”
