After alienating a significant portion of its user base last year with an unsuccessful redesign, news aggregation platform Digg is launching another new approach to news. The platform announced Tuesday a new feature that will automatically pull in content from publishers, sort it by topic and rank it according to the opinions of some of the site's most reputable users.

The new feature, called "Newsrooms," has the same basic objectives as last August's fateful redesign: create a better way for individuals to find news that matters to them, and introduce a broader base of content to the site.

Digg's 2010 redesign encouraged users to "build their own Digg" by following publications and users, including those on a "suggested user list." Through their feeds, publications were effectively submitting their own stories automatically.

"We stopped pulling those feeds in," CEO Matt Williams tells Mashable. "It was impacting the experience of Diggers because they weren't getting credit for submitting stories anymore. In their minds, a bot was getting credit...[The attempt at personalization] was a good idea, it was just overshadowed by all the other things about Digg that changed with it."

The new solution, which is still in invite-only beta, focuses on following topics rather than users or publications. Topic newsrooms range from broad categories like technology to specific categories like Lady Gaga. An algorithm takes into account how much buzz stories are getting on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Until they are actually submitted by a user, they stay in a section called Newswire. Once officially submitted (with a click), other users can vote stories up or down, and much like Digg's core page, the most popular stories hit a topic-specific front page.

Users can develop more influence in a particular topic by participating in it, and their votes count for more. This is also true on the main Digg page, but in topic newsrooms users are ranked on a transparent leader board and receive badges for their participation.

Williams hopes that the new system of combining expert influencers with widely discussed stories from the web will float the most meaningful news on a given topic to the top of its page. Instead of following publications or celebrities, users can now follow these Newsrooms in order to populate their personal Digg pages with news that's interesting to them.

"The strategy of personalizing news is still there," says Williams, who replaced founder Kevin Rose as Digg CEO shortly after the disastrous redesign. "I think it was just ahead of its time."

Digg has a long way to go in making up for the bad timing. The site lost more than one-third of its team, including its founding CEO — and, according to several sources, the site its dominance over competitor Reddit.

Newsrooms and expert influencers seem like a more sensible way to personalize news for a platform whose users thrive on recognition. But can it reverse the damage? Let us know what you think in the comments.





