Knewsroom’s Crowdsourced “Paper” Feels Oddly Familiar

Knewsroom, the crowdsourced online newsource has just launched in beta.

From their website:

“Knewsroom™ is a community-directed news publication where not only do you have a voice—you get paid to use it. “The Knews” gets published every morning, featuring the previous day’s top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment.

What makes it in? The community decides.

The best part? 20% of every dollar we generate in advertising gets split with the people who make the Knews happen: writers, readers, evangelists…anyone looking to turn extra brainwidth into extra cash.”

If you want to learn more details on how it actually works go here.

I like the idea of Knewsroom but the results are pretty much what you’ll find on the frontpages of most of the major news sites.  Today has stories on Clinton’s toothless win in WV, Edwards support of Obama, death tolls from China and the Celtics win again at home.  Not exactly breaking any new ground here.

Kluster – A Crowdsourcing Experiment or Valid Business Model?

I continue to be both completely intrigued and a bit unsure about the recently launched site Kluster.  The site is a place for people to post all sorts of questions, problems, challenges or business proposals and to attract others to contribute to the solution for a predetermined compensation.

The site itself is fun to browse and seems to have a fair amount of community involvement.  Now comes word (via Mashable) that Kluster is launching a sort of newsletter…

“The site is a bit of a diversion from the typical online news site which is updated 24×7. Rather, Knewsroom will publish once daily, with users deciding on what stories make the cut. It’s sort of like the morning, dead-tree-paper version of The New York Times that your parent’s get, but online. It’s even broken down into 5 different sections (like Politics, Sports, Entertainment, etc.) with 5 stories in each.”

In addition to everyone voting on which stories will make the cut, users can submit their own stories, which, if used, will earn them $150.

My big question is whether or not this crowdsourcing approach will actually result in a unique newsletter.  There is certainly no limit of places to get your daily news and, in this case, you have to actually wait for it to be delivered – something that most netizens don’t put up with these days.

I’m certainly curious to see what the newsletter looks like but I fear it will just be a rehash of the days news – information I will have already consumed over the course of the day.