Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: News aggregation site Newser.com just launched a new NEWSER BY USERS feature, which allows readers to find, summarize and post their own stories directly onto the homepage. 
  
 "This is the new way people read news--they share it," Newser founder and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff told us in a phone interview. "People read free news everywhere, take it and put their own thoughts on it. It's Rupert Murdoch's worse nightmare." 
  
  
  
 Below Newser.com's main grid, which features summarized stories and photos curated with the help of Newsers' 16 staffers, the second grid below it is wholly created by user contributions. They can sign up and use the site's own tools to post their own photos, text, and headline onto their stories. 
  
 Users no longer have to wait for mainstream media to bubble up the hottest news item -- they create it, Wolff explained. 
  
 He added that while major media companies have "grown incredibly paranoid" about their power structure and aging business model in the new media landscape, by putting up paywalls, Newser is essentially breaking them down. 
  
 "We're aggregators, but we thought, let's get out of the way and see what happens," Wolff told us. "Why the hell not?" 
  
 Editors won't be looking at the posts before they are posted online, but Wolff said if any of the user-generated posts could get them prosecuted for obscenity or libel, they will consider taking them down. 
  
 Otherwise, "we're very determined to offer people full control," Wolff told us. "We're opening our platform to them." Newser currently has 2.5 million unique visitors per month, according to Wolff. 
  
 This story was originally published by Newser. ||||| Let me say it again: News used to be a scarce commodity; but then the Internet turned it into a vast surplus, too great for anybody to consume in what still remains only 24 hours. Except information can’t just be ignored: The reader has to cram more news into the same amount of time to stay informed.A critical added value then for online news is efficiency. A digital news provider is defined by the kind of stories it chooses to link to from among tens of thousands of surplus stories. Such links not only save time but have made headlines the main form of news—few people take the second step to the actual story. One of our innovations at Newser is to offer with the headline a summary. In a best journalistic practice—shorter is better; summarizing is the essence of the craft—we’ve developed an approach that can radically compress any story without losing its key facts.Not surprisingly, the traditional providers with their dwindling market share—exemplified by Rupert Murdoch—insist they deserve rules and regulations that would continue to support their methods.Sharon Waxman, a former New York Times reporter who now edits the Wrap—a low-traffic news site about the movie business—is having indigestion because Newser shortens her stories (she says that we don’t link to her—but is really just sour that Newser readers don’t find a need to click the link under the BIG RED SOURCE BOX that would take them to her longer story). Sounding more like a self-righteous New York Times veteran than a new news entrepreneur, she is of the opinion that the online news marketplace should be structured to best provide her with a living. "We’re talking about survival here,” she declares. In other words, the rules should favor her business, rather than the efficiency that the consumer is looking for.Waxman and Murdoch are hiding behind a curious conceit of value and originality—as though they own the news. The foundation of news, I am happy to instruct, has always been the rewrite desk. My first job in journalism, in another age, was to collect all the newspapers in New York as they came off their respective presses and rush them back to rewrite at the New York Times.The facts are the facts—resorted, rewritten, republished as soon as they are known. The value is the style and efficiency with which they are presented.Murdoch’s facts (Murdoch runs the world’s greatest rewrite empire—it’s a key tabloid skill) tend to come in a package arguably less suited to the online world and more suited to another, quainter, newsprint era. Waxman’s facts (she admits that a big part of her site comes from other sources) are rendered, to my mind, in a maddeningly loquacious, New York Times-y feature-section tone and manner. They just can’t shut up at the Wrap.Anyway, we took Waxman’s 804-word diatribe against us, and, in Newser style, reduced it to 133 words —see if that’s enough for you.More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com , where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWolffNYC ||||| The nightly news broadcasts produced by CBS, NBC, and ABC may have become irrelevant to smart news consumers, yet the nation's dailies continue to pretend it matters who anchors the broadcasts. Yesterday's announcement that in four months Diane Sawyer will drop her butt into the seat currently warmed by Charlie Gibson inspired Page One coverage in today's New York Times and detailed reports in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. 
  
 But why? Let's see a show of hands in the Press Box audience: How many of you have watched the nightly news on ABC, CBS, or NBC in its entirety over the last month? 
  
 If you raised your hand, chances are you're collecting Social Security benefits. Last week, the three programs combined attracted an average of 20.3 million viewers a night, but most of them are old folks, creatures of habit and too infirm to change channels. Only 2 million people in the World News' audience of 6 million come from the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic. 
  
 Why the 63-year-old Sawyer would want to enter this dying news genre confounds reason—unless she's simply weary of rising in the early a.m. to appear on Good Morning America, which she's co-hosted since 1999. She obviously knows that the programs do less "real" journalism than they did in their 1960s-1970s heydays, when what they really excelled at was pointing to the headlines in that day's New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. 
  
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 As the network news audience has dwindled over the past three decades, broadcasters have reconfigured the shows as "infotainment" to boost ratings, aping the dreadful local news that they once disdained, says George Washington University media professor Mark Feldstein. 
  
 "The journalistic value of these programs is marginal at this point," says Feldstein, and the appointment viewing of tuning in to the nightly news at 6:30 or 7 p.m. is a "relic of the past." Feldstein, who has worked in TV news at NBC, ABC, CNN, and local stations, says that Sawyer's promotion won't change the underlying content of the show. Indeed, for all the noise made about Katie Couric's ascension to CBS Evening News anchor, her dismally performing show—an average of 5.4 million total viewers last week; 1.6 million in the 25-54 age group—has failed to distinguish itself in any meaningful way. 
  
 If the nightly programs add so little to our news diet and attract so few viewers, then why do they still air? Because they are very profitable, says Michael Socolow, an assistant professor in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of Maine. In a forthcoming paper about network-news profitability, Socolow dispels the notion that the nightly news programs have ever been a civic-minded charity on the part of the networks. Back in 1969, NBC News' Huntley-Brinkley Report, which was No. 2 to the CBS Evening News' No. 1, generated $34 million in revenues on a budget of $7.2 million, making it the network's biggest source of revenue—bigger than Laugh-In or The Dean Martin Show. 
  
 That CBS News pays Couric—whose show trails a distant third in the ratings—a reported $15 million a year just to read the news gives you an indication of how lucrative these doddering franchises can be. The shows are still earning dividends from the Food and Drug Administration's 1997 liberalization of advertising rules for prescription drugs. Without that change, Socolow speculated in a 2005 Boston Phoenix feature by Dan Kennedy, the evening news shows "would have been gone." Spending on prescription-drug advertising now stands at about $4.3 billion and shows no sign of retreating. 
  
 According to a 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer piece by Gail Shister, ABC News was paying Charlie Gibson an estimated $8 million to anchor World News. Whatever they're paying Sawyer to replace him, it's too much. My advice to Sawyer is this: If you really want to improve World News, if you really want to make an indelible mark on journalism, turn down the job and persuade ABC News to divert the millions it ordinarily pays its anchor and spend it on 50 or 80 additional reporters to break stories. 
  
 But who will read the news on air?! I don't think it matters to the news or to the ratings who they put in the chair as long as that person is properly groomed and doesn't drool. That much was proved 42 years ago, when Walter Cronkite joined the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists' strike on the networks and the network called on a 28-year-old CBS lawyer and aspiring broadcaster named Arnold Zenker to replace him for two weeks. He did a fine job. 
  
 As Socolow writes in "Anchors Away: Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite and the 1967 AFTRA Strike" (Journalism History, Summer 2003), Zenker's debut broadcast bombed in the ratings against NBC's Huntley, who crossed the picket line to broadcast. But by the second night, after the press had reported Zenker's strike-breaking performance, Zenker's ratings were only a single percentage point behind Cronkite's from the previous week. 
  
 Zenker's success temporarily demystified the network anchor job, Socolow writes, pointing to New Yorker TV critic Michael Arlen, who found that "the evening news as read by Mr. Zenker … sounds pretty much the same as the evening news as read by Walter Cronkite." 
  
 It's up to Sawyer to decide on her legacy: Ending her career as one of the last over-paid network announcers or helping ABC to plot a new news course—and finding the next Zenker. 
  
 ****** 
  
 Speaking of accidental anchors, Bob Schieffer had better ratings than Katie Couric. For more on Couric, see Bill Wyman's Hitsville blog. What sort of impact will Diane Sawyer have on nightly news? Equal to that of Connie Chung when she and Dan Rather co-anchored the CBS Evening News, I'd say. Who should be our next Zenker? I'd like to see Avi Zenilman in the chair. Send your nominations to and listen to my Twitter broadcast. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) 
  
 Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Zenker in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send to . 
  
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Output:
Jack Shafer doesn't like Michael Wolff—he really, really doesn't like him—but he has to admit that in the battle of Wolff (for Newser) vs Sharon Waxman (for the Wrap), he's on Wolff's side. That's because Newser has something to teach Waxman and other news purists, he writes on Slate: "The mattresses of words that journalists rest their stories on aren't always as precious as we think they are. Sometimes shorter is better." Based on seeing a story of his own whittled from 1,025 words to Newser's 140, Shafer writes, "I've got to admit that Newser has a knack for finding the most salient 75 to 150 words in a piece for excerpting and rewriting." Beyond that, he notes, "The fact that about 2.5 million unique users visit Newser each month indicates that abbreviating and rewriting other publications' copy for maximum effect—something journalists have been doing since the dawn of journalism—is a smart idea."