• The Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 8, 2009 12:15 PM

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg reports that a new site "with a novel approach to journalistic entrepreneurship" is opening its doors. Called True/Slant, the site, a mixture of journalism and social networking, aims to develop new forms of advertising. It is run by former news executives at America Online who worked at a number of different publications, including The Wall Street Journal.

True/Slant is launching in "OpenAlpha" with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics, including politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food. According to Mossberg, each of these contributors gets a page to house their work with the idea of attracting a social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also features headlines of stories found elsewhere on the Web, selected by contributors, that link back to the originating outside site.

The initial group of contributors includes former or current writers for The Financial Times, The New York Times, Time Magazine,The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone and others. Readers will have the option of going directly to the page of their favorite contributor, or to the site's home page, which will stitch together popular and selected content based on the users' use of the site. True/Slant will be ad-supported, but, it will also offer advertisers their own pages where they can run blogs and try to attract their own network of followers. Contributors to True/Slant will be offered a share of ad and sponsorship revenues generated by their pages and in some cases, equity in the project, which is backed by venture capital.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »