Sandeep Junnarkar, from the Online Journalism Review, got an interview with Newsvine’s co-founder Calvin Tang.
Newsvine offers a combination of traditional media news feeds and citizen journalism input. “A combination of new and old media coverage yields a flow of information from event to consumer that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Tang said.

One of Newsvine’s most prominent features is the communal way in which articles are prioritized on the page.
First, consumers can vote to rank the articles – many do, relatively, 15% of users. The ranking also depends on the number of page views, representative of the article’s appeal. Lastly, the individual time spent on an article is also factored into the ranking to evaluate an article’s true retention capacity.
The news selection process thus combines community interest and individual preference. A good compromise between being forced to digest the stuffing marketed by the corporate media, and, at the other end, wandering aimlessly in a sea of fact-less, unreliable user content (more on this dialetic and NewsTrust). To that extent, the news is ‘custom-made’ by, and for, the community.

The real development Newsvine is working on concerns individual, custom-made news. Tang insisted that this customization doesn’t require active user involvement (through questionnaires for example), but is done rather by “being able to pick up passively on the behavior of a reader.”
For example, by analyzing the user’s IP address, the site could provide local news relevant to the user. And by going through the list of articles a user voted on, Newsvine can identify the subject of articles that might specifically interest the user. The other way round, users can be categorized according to similar interests or opinions – Tang was unclear how that classification would work. “Now here are articles that you did not vote on but voted on by other users, who we think, are similar to you. And in that sense we are showing you things that you might have missed but would have liked,” explained Tang.

"I would like to think that Newsvine is at the front of the pack as far as personalization of news but I think we, and the industry in general, have a long way to go," he added.

For those who reminisce nostalgically about newspapers’ glorious past, is it really realistic to entirely refuse this evolution of alternative journalism?
“I think that eventually all traditional media companies will have to rely on some form of citizen reporting, partly motivated by financial reasons but also because of access,” said Tang.

Perhaps one of the things that make Tang and Newsvine so readily accessible, as posted in a comment to the interview, is “the sense of family and community rendered by Calvin and associates that makes it so special.” Indeed, the progress towards participatory journalism and custom-made news may reflect a social desire towards a homely, community-like, news process.

As social successes such as YouTube and MySpace took two years to confirm their status, only time will tell if Newsvine is on the right end of journalism's evolution.

For more information on Newsvine, NewsTrust, or the interview. 

Source: Online Journalism Review