Newser is a news search engine finessed by human editors. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and journalist Michael Wolff. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.� This is not unlike other sites like Newsvine, Digg, Netscape etc. Editors summarise breaking stories.

Newser looks nice but it is like shoe-horning a portal play onto a web which is increasingly focused on niche and application/function, not on telling me which story is “big� right now. The point is, I already know that. I don’t see this working…