After two years, NewsCred relaunched its website today to give users the ability to create their own customized newspaper – without the paper.

Basically, the site allows users to create their own edition by aggregating news, images, search for key terms, and videos. It’s another tool for personalized news, putting it in a easy-to-read fashion, but not different from the likes of other readers or aggregators out there. The unique aspect is that this site brings in original content into the mix. Users can write their own “editorials” or blog posts.

The customization seems to be this site’s appeal. You can create your own design style, and users can also follow other NewsCred publishers’ newspapers in true Twitter fashion. The design, however, seems to not be as customizable as some platforms, which may be a strength and weakness.

The site could attract the non-techy, but lose out users who want full control of customizing the desplayed design. The user-created “newspaper” includes sections of news topics, and it makes it easy to share the newspaper through social tools. Here’s an example of an edition I created called “Social Journalism.”

It takes the features of a blogging platform, Twitter and Tumblr’s follow feature, and an aggregation of news from user-selected sources all into one site. However, original content has the potential to get lost in the mix. It does have its own section and can be featured on the homepage, but doesn’t really stick out from the rest of the aggregated content.

The creators of the platform raised a seed round less than $1 million so hopefully more features will be integrated soon, though the site will also be launching the NewsCred Platform API, which may drive some new features. This seems to be a tool that would be more useful to the user and not the “audience” that user generates. What I mean is that it may be a good way to track news topics, but not necessarily something engaging that readers would want to participate in. Either way, I am curious to see where this goes.

What do you think? Will you use NewsCred’s new site?

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