Viator founder and chairman Rod Cuthbert launched a new venture, Qewz, a news website that aggregates editorial content of almost every stripe.
Thus, as Qewz details the storm about BP's Tony Hayward going sailing with his son, the website anchors its coverage with a BBC story, but then offers a variety of other views using pieces from an ABC News blog, Politico, CBS News and The Spoof.
Qewz details the day's headline-grabbing stories from the left, right and every opinion in between with an editorial process that offers a lot of manual intervention, which will "decrease somewhat" as the computational linguistics of co-founders John Lowe and Jordan Digby further automate the news curating, Cuthbert says.
Cuthbert, who took the chairman's role at Viator more than a year ago, doesn't cite News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch specifically, but he sees Qewz as helping to formulate answers for traditional print media, which have found that "the current model doesn't cut it."
Cuthbert says the media are looking for "quite radically different ways to deliver the news" and it's his hope that Qewz would contribute to the process and become an acquisition target because of its "technology and approach."
So, then, what is Qewz's business model? Is it advertising, subscription or a hybrid?
Cuthbert says Qewz has adequate funding from the three co-founders and angel investors and is solely focused on building traffic, not revenue.
He says introducing advertising would push the company in a different direction.
"We don't want to pollute or confuse our efforts," Cuthbert says.
With traditional media "getting decimated," Cuthbert sees a parallel to the situation of the traditional travel industry in the mid-1990s when it, too, was struggling to come to terms with the Internet.
Anything that causes the consumer to become "amused and engaged" with the news would benefit traditional media as they search for new approaches and models, Cuthbert says.
But, will aggregating news help form an answer?
Cuthbert notes that Viator, too, gathers the "best offerings and the best suppliers," but adds value in the process.
"This collection of articles is not just a random choice like you see on Google News," Cuthbert says, pointing to the added value.
Cuthbert, who's no longer involved in Viator's day to day operations, got the idea for Qewz during his travels when he noticed that the slants on the day's news varied widely depending on his location.
Cuthbert acknowledges that Qewz is "U.S.-centric for now, but we'll get to the U.K., Australia and the rest of the world soon."
Unlike Viator -- which is Latin for traveler -- Qewz has no meaning.
It's a four-letter domain that rhymes with news, Cuthbert adds.
The company also owns Qews.com.