An interesting news aggregation site has launched, with some non-obvious-yet-blue-chip names behind it: Newser.com is a new aggregation site which mixes human/editorial curation with algorithm-driven methods. The site has been launched by Patrick Spain, the CEO of Highbeam (cofounder and former CEO of Hoover’s) and Michael Wolff (that of Burnrate fame, and current Vanity Fair media columnist), and Caroline Miller, the former Editor in Chief of New York Magazine, is also the EIC of Newser.com. The mission of the site: “quickly learn more about the most important and most talked about news stories each day, as well as to dig a bit deeper on news topics that interest you.” You can probably use the same combination of words to describe most news aggregation sites out there, including Daylife, Newsvine, Digg, Netscape, and many others.

On the software methodology side, “Newser’s methodology measures the ubiquity of coverage by the top-ranked 100 English-language news sites, the prominence with which those sites feature the stories and the popularity of a given story with readers.” Then editors jump in to summarize. More on what makes the site different here.

Wolff came up with the idea, which he told me was born with the idea of trying to reinvent the network TV news paradigm for the Web. Fun and efficient, that’s the defining theme, he explained. Earlier, the plans were to work with IAC, but those fell through, and Spain, who had been mulling around a similar idea, joined together on this. Advertising is non existent now, except for Google ads, but Spain said it will come later.

Will it work? It certainly looks neat, and helps in efficient news consumption. But tough to make a go as a destination brand, especially as a generalist news site, and then the issues of scale, competition and specialist news sites. Ultimately it might work in conjunction with a bigger brand/play.