Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launchedMediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.
As McCarthy notes in her announcement, “media business is in tumult” and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories.
Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera’s team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn’t). Based on this experience, the team has “outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.”
It will be interesting to see how Rivera’s team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story – which is about both the tech and the media business – is featured on bothsites.
Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn’t feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.
Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.
For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy.