After wasting time reading biased, misleading, factually inaccurate articles on crowdsourcing sites, smart people leave. This is an example of the bad driving out the good. This leaves mostly true-believers promoting Ron Paul, marijuana legalization and dozens of other extremist causes on crowdsourcing sites.
In contrast to having a single human editor such as Matt Drudge or having the human crowd be the editor, Google News uses a non-human algorithm as the editor. Like its search engine, Google News strives to be unbiased by delegating the task to an algorithm.
Google does largely succeed in eliminating their own (Google employee) biases, by using external, non-Google links to rank and by using the same algorithm on all sites. But since the external links are sometimes from by biased people, Google has managed to capture the biases of the public. A Google Search on the term “Jew” leads to the racist website JewWatch; Google offers their explanation above this search result.
JewWatch is the most notable example of bad results from Google, but in short the problem is that computer algorithms are not smart enough to tell a good news story from a populist, misleading rant. Of course you can read the “story” and readily tell its a rant by some idiot, but why waste your time. Even worse are false stories which are deceptively convincing since you dont know what to believe.
Shrewd.com takes a different approach; instead of trying to pick the best news stories, Shrewd.com makes it easier to click through to the home pages of the core news sites. Shrewd.com is little more than a list of the thirty best news websites where thirty professional, experienced editors each have selected the most important news to put on their home pages.
In other words, Shrewd.com solves the portal-editor problem by letting one quickly see the home page or front page of the most important news sites. One can customize Shrewd.com by adding links below the thirty best news sites. Common uses are adding local news websites and hobby sites for one-click access. For example, hikers can add Backpacker.com.