INNOVATIVE SITE SETS OUT TO RECORD THE BIAS SKEW OF MAJOR NEWS STORIES
January 2nd 2008 01:18
Indian entrepreneur Vipul Vyas is intent on harnessing political passion to develop a better news aggregator with his site, Skewz.
The Poynter Institute reports that Skewz allows registered users to submit news stories, including blog posts, rate or skew them on a polarity scale from strongly liberal to strongly conservative, and add comments or the rating rationale.
Skewz seeks to establish a middle ground between the polarities of politics, and also indicate how people view the biases and credibility of news organisations. It allows users to report on stories they regard as biased or as admirable.
Poynter said that to do this, Skewz offers "different shades" view of stories, which show articles ranked by popularity or recency. Users can slide the red or blue handles on the slider to narrow selection from all stories to any combination of liberal and conservative.
The site also has a split-screen view, showing liberal vs. conservative coverage. This indicates where a story's overall skew falls on the political spectrum.
Skewz can also provide insight into how the media frames issues. The site has a media comparison chart with several ways to view and compare news organisation or blog stories.
Skewz has about 600 registered users, and about 15 to 20 percent post regularly. Vyus says his goal is to build the site's user base to 10,000 or more because this will produce better information.
MediaBlab verdict: Skewz in an interesting concept but the execution, the site itself, is a horror: complicated and cluttered in a dog’s breakfast manner and not at all user-friendly.
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