• by Lauren Berger , April 16, 2008

A dozen issues of The New Yorker. January and February's National Geographic. Several dog-eared editions of Rolling Stone. You meant to get to them all, really. But things happen. You've fallen drastically behind. 

If only someone would dig through the piles and mine the few gems worth reading. At brijit.com, a group of in-house editors (and hundreds of freelance writers) have done just that. More than simply aggregating content, the site provides users with an informative 100-word abstract and quantitative rating for each piece. Thus, regardless of how you prefer to digest daily media you'll be able to distinguish the must-reads from the fluff in seconds flat.

Beyond adjusting to users' reading habits, it's Brijit's hybrid editorial style that deserves attention. Expanding the role of citizen journalists, the idea relies on a self-selected pool of writers for the majority of its reviews. Stay-at-home moms, college students and well-read bloggers battle it out, claiming stories from the virtual assignment desk. Throw in several traditional, top-down editors, a few algorithms and voila: news content like never before.

But it's the untapped freelancer network that may hold the key to media's future. Brijit's founder, CEO and editor-in-chief, Jeremy Brosowsky, eventually plans to enable publications to assign items directly through the writer's area. Here, they can look up freelancer statistics (How likely are they to hit a deadline on time? Do they prefer to cover science or politics?). Writers will get more gigs, publishers will rely on a more structured system, and Brijit will have brought them all together.