Caroline Miller

Yesterday evening, journalists and newsy iconoclasts alike gathered at Graydon Carter's uber-trendy, West Village bistro, the Waverly Inn, to celebrate the launch of Newser.com, Michael Wolff's latest project, an innovative online news service that claims to "do the reading for you."

The site, which has been available in beta form since August but launched yesterday with all the bells and whistles, uses high-tech machines to scour the web for news. Human beings, in the form of editors and writers, then comb through these stories to find the ones to highlight. Once top-tier stories are selected, they are fused and re-formatted to be presented in a "smart and entertaining" way. Drudge-like, the site runs the gamut from Turkey's political crisis to Oprah's school girl scandals. One cutesy, and possibly brilliant, feature: an adjustable filter tool, which can be set anywhere between opposite spectrums of "Soft" and "Hard" news, so that readers control whether they get entertainment or more serious journalism.

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