This will not come as knewz to anyone. Rupert Murdoch’s www.knewz.com has folded, closed up shop after less than 2 years.
You may not have known about knewz. If you snoozed, you…well, you know what I mean. This was the second attempt to launch a news website apart from the New York Post and other News Corp. sites that would be tabloidy and traffic in made up news. It was designed as a “news aggregator,” meant to take on the Drudge Report, the sixth highest ranked news site on the internet. Knewz.com was ranked number 7,425 on Alexa.com among all US websites.
The first was a right wing leaning site called Heatstreet.com. That site, before it also expired after a short run, had trouble with its url because it shared a name with a tattoo and piercing parlor in South Carolina. Knewz had an issue because some might have confused with a polka band of the same name from Buffalo, New York.
Both Heatstreet and Knewz were run by News Corp’s online wunderkind, Noah Kotch. He’s now run two spectacular failures for the company. What’s next is anyone’s guess: editor of the Wall Street Journal?
All that’s left of Knewz.com is this farewell on their landing page: “We started Knewz as an experiment in news aggregation because we wanted to gather a diverse range of quality journalism, to highlight all sides of every story and to protect and project provenance. We certainly had provenance, but not profits, and so we bid Knewz farewell. Thank you to the millions of Knewz users who saw the value of the service and supported our mission.”
Here’s a musical farewell, polka style
