Credit: By Cezary Borysiuk on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
A former journalist has created and launched a new social news curation and aggregation platform called Newspeg.
Based on a Pinterest-style structure and design, founder Mark Potts described Newspeg as "a site where people can really easily share and save news stories, in a visual kind of way, in a way that picks up graphics from the story but also lets people know where it came from".
Users can create their own boards based on their interests, pegging articles onto each board and creating their own personal network of stories.
Media outlets, for example, could build their own pages on the site, pegging collections of articles and images onto different, categorised boards, organised by specific topics or even specific news events. Or a journalist with a specific beat might like to use the platform as a place to curate relevant content from across the internet.
"I think it becomes both a way to create a collection of your own stories, that you saved, or a collection of stories on a specific topic", Potts explained.
Newspeg is designed with publishers in mind, and Potts added that the platform also aims to encourage click-through traffic. When users click a peg on Newspeg, for example, they are taken directly to the site of the original article.
The platform could also be used by journalists, including freelancers, as a place to archive their work, as an online, visual clippings portfolio.
"People are already using it, not just to share, but to save," Potts said. "They're almost scrapbooking with it. So people are putting up their own stories that they did as journalists or as an organisation's doing. One guy has been collecting his blog posts there".
One journalist already trying out the platform is Steve Buttry, digital transformation editor for Digital First Media, who told Journalism.co.uk that he felt the platform has potential for journalists "as a curation tool, similar to how journalists and newsrooms use Pinterest or RebelMouse".
"It’s certainly easy to use if you’re familiar with Pinterest," he added. "It’s easy to 'peg' a story you want to save and add it to a pegboard".
Potts also hopes the site will be of use to the industry as an alternative content management system (CMS), a template from which news organisations can build their own branded Newspeg.
He said they are currently looking into "how an organisation could build its own custom version of Newspeg essentially, either off the shelf or working with us and we create something that actually has their logo on it specifically".
Potts said he anticipates working in collaboration with news organisations who want to use the Newspeg concept to build a structure which their own CMS does not support.
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