Start spreading the Knewz: News Corp.’s defunct online news aggregator platform is being resurrected, slightly more than a month after being shut down.
The Daily Beast is reporting that former American Media Inc. chief (and tabloid titan) Dylan Howard has purchased the site from Rupert Murdoch.
“Let’s give it a second chance,” News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson told the Daily Beast, regarding the imminent purchase of Knewz. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources told the Beast it is set to be announced imminently.
Now one might recognize the name Dylan Howard from his longtime friendship with Donald Trump, and the role in the scheme to “catch and kill” stories about former president’s extramarital affairs.
The Daily Beast adds:
The purchase of Knewz represents Howard’s latest attempt to return to media relevance after leaving AMI last year. While once a major figure in the shadowy world of celebrity media tabloids, Howard faced a torrent of criticism for his role in attempting to bury stories about Trump’s affairs—which AMI ultimately admitted violated campaign finance law— as well as his attempt to dig up dirt on women accusing disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct.
Knewz was originally marketed as a competitor to Google News. However, the platform just wasn’t getting much traffic, and News Corp. decided to shut it down after just 18 months of operation.
“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,” a message on the site said earlier this year. “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.”
From its Jan. 2020 launch until its July 2021 conclusion, Knewz aggregated news headlines from more than 400 publishers with a wide variety of political leanings. These outlets included: Murdoch‘s Fox News, News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, as well as CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC News, the New York Post, Anchorage Daily News, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Axios, Bangor Daily News, Black Enterprise, The Blaze, Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Daily Kos, Deadline, Defense News, El Paso Times, Essence, The Federalist, Foreign Affairs, Hartford Courant, Mother Jones, The Nation, National Review, Newsmax, Out, Reason, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, The Root, Scientific American, Talking Points Memo, Tampa Bay Times, Townhall, Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, Washington Post and Winston-Salem Journal.
“Knewz is no more” pic.twitter.com/HzCbudU65b
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 9, 2021