News Corp is reportedly releasing 'Knewz,' a Google News competitor that it hopes will help readers find news stories from more and different sources (GOOG, FB)

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News Corp — the mass media company, which owns publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Times — will reportedly launch 'Knewz,' a news aggregation site, later this year.
The decision comes as News Corp's executives have become increasingly concerned about how existing platforms, like Google News and Facebook, surface content for its readers.
Knowledge of the Knewz project was first reported by The Journal on Thursday.
Knewz will pull articles from hundreds of news sources, including prominent publications like The New York Times, while also highlighting work by smaller outlets, regardless of political leanings.
Knewz.com will also elevate an original story over aggregation pieces, and it will not ding articles requiring a subscription from gaining exposure, the report said.
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News Corp — the company behind publications like The Wall Street Journal and The Times — will reportedly launch Knewz, an online news aggregation platform later this year. It's apparently an attempt to address its executives' concerns with how existing platforms, like Google News and Facebook, surface content for readers.

Knowledge of the project was first reported by The Journal on Thursday.

According to the report, the aggregation site will pull articles from hundreds of news sources, including prominent publications like The New York Times, while also highlighting work by smaller outlets — something News Corp executives believe services like Google News and Facebook's social feed don't handle adequately.

Those smaller outlets will include conservative-leaning sites like the Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, and the Washington Examiner, sources told the Journal. But the project isn't an attempt to only prop up right-leaning outlets. Liberal publications like the Daily Kos and ThinkProgress are among the less-mainstream sites that could see more exposure, the report said.

Knewz will also elevate an original story over aggregation pieces, and it will not ding articles for requiring a subscription from gaining exposure on its site, according to the report. The Journal said that in 2017, Google ended its policy of downgrading articles from subscription news services, in part as a result of pushback from News Corp executives.

"We are exploring this with the goal of recognizing and rewarding the provenance of journalism, and to drive traffic and data to publishers - including subscription sites - so their original work is respected," a News Corp spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday. "We want people to see a wide spectrum of news and views, from local, niche and national sources, without bent or bias."

Meanwhile, it's not totally clear how much News Corp may have kept its fellow media titans in the know on Knewz: While the Journal's report indicates that NBC will have its content aggregated on Knewz, NBC News' Dylan Byers said on Twitter that the NBC News Group's head of digital told him that "we have never heard of 'Knewz' and do not plan on participating in a platform with that name."

The report comes as conservative lawmakers in the US, including President Donald Trump, have become increasingly critical of Silicon Valley tech companies, especially Google, who they say have introduced political bias into their products. In June, President Trump said that Google and Facebook should be sued for being "totally biased." More recently, on Monday, Trump tweeted about a two-year-old study that claimed Hillary Clinton could have received millions of votes in the 2016 presidential election as a result of bias in the way Google ranked its search results.

A Google spokesperson said that the researcher's claims were "inaccurate" and that its "goal is to always provide people with access to high quality, relevant information for their queries, without regard to political viewpoint."

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