Kinja is a free online

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital Content (media), content such as online newsp ...

, launched in April 2004. It is operated by

G/O Media G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that owns and operates the digital media outlets '' Kotaku'' and '' The Root''. It was formed in 2019 after the private equity firm Great Hill Partners purchased two digital portfolios from ...

. It was formerly operated by

Gizmodo Media Group Gizmodo Media Group was an online media company and blog network formerly operated by Univision Communications (now TelevisaUnivision) in its Fusion Media Group division. The company was created from assets acquired from Gawker Media during its ...

, which was purchased by

Univision Communications TelevisaUnivision (formerly known as Univision Communications) is a Mexican-American mass media, media company headquartered in Miami and Mexico City that owns American Spanish language broadcast network Univision and free-to-air channels in Mex ...

during

Gawker Media Gawker Media LLC (formerly Blogwire, Inc. and Gawker Media, Inc.) was an American internet media company and Link farm#Blog network, blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorpor ...

's bankruptcy.

History

With the intention of making blogs more accessible to the public,

Nick Denton Nicholas Guido Anthony Denton (born 24 August 1966) is a British Internet entrepreneur, journalist, and blogger. He is the founder and former proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and he was the managing editor of the New York City� ...

of Gawker Media and

Meg Hourihan Meg Hourihan is the co-founder of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google. Career Hourihan graduated from Tufts University in 1994. In 1999, she and Evan Williams co-founded Pyr ...

Pyra Labs Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003. History Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web ...

created Kinja, which began as an investigation into the navigation of blogs. It was dubbed Kinja in October 2003. On February 11, 2013, Kinja 1.0 was launched on

Jalopnik Static Media Inc., the business name of 7Hops.com Inc., is an American internet company established in 2012, incorporated in Delaware, and based in Indianapolis. It operates ZergNet, a content recommendation business that promotes paid content ...

. Changes included an entire site and platform redesign, favoring a more

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

-esque design. Users received the ability to create their own blogs on Kinja, replacing the old profile system. Comments, replies, and posts all aggregate on the user's personal blog. On March 11, 2013, Kinja was launched on Gawker Media blogs

io9 ''io9'' is a sub-blog of the technology blog ''Gizmodo'' that focuses on science fiction and fantasy pop culture, with former focuses on science, technology and futurism. It was created as a standalone blog in 2008 by editor Annalee Newitz under ...

and

Deadspin ''Deadspin'' is a sports blog owned by Lineup Publishing. Founded by Will Leitch in 2005 and originally based in Chicago, it was then sold to Gawker Media, Univision Communications and G/O Media. Lineup Publishing acquired it in March 2024, t ...

, followed by

Kotaku ''Kotaku'' is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier. History ...

on March 25, 2013;

Jezebel Jezebel ()"Jezebel"
(US) and

on April 8, 2013;

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on 31 January 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is owned by Ziff Davis. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including Microsoft Windows, M ...

on April 15, 2013; and

Gizmodo ''Gizmodo'' () is a design, technology, science, and science fiction website. It was originally launched as part of the Gawker Media network run by Nick Denton. ''Gizmodo'' also includes the sub-blogs ''io9'' and ''Earther'', which focus on pop ...

on April 29, 2013. In 2017, following Univision Communications' purchase of Gawker Media assets and their reorganization as

, the company began to migrate some of its existing websites to Kinja as well, including ''

The A.V. Club ''The A.V. Club'' is an online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. ''The A.V. Club'' was created in ...

'', Fusion (whose online editorial operation was later re-launched as ''

Splinter A splinter (also known as a sliver) is a fragment of a larger object, or a foreign body that penetrates or is purposely injected into a body. The foreign body must be lodged inside tissue to be considered a splinter. Splinters may cause initia ...

''), ''

The Root "The Root" is a song by American recording artist D'Angelo. It is the eighth track on his second studio album, '' Voodoo'', which was released on January 25, 2000, by Virgin Records. "The Root" was recorded and produced by D'Angelo at New York's ...

'', and ''

The Onion ''The Onion'' is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is currently based in Chicago, but originated as a weekly print publication ...

''. As of April 2018, ''

ClickHole ClickHole is a satirical website that parodies clickbait websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy. It was launched on June 12, 2014, by ''The Onion,'' in conjunction with that publication's decision to stop its print edition and shift its focus ex ...

'' is also on the Kinja platform. The move was made as Univision staff were heavily interested in Kinja's "inset" feature for external links—which can display

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

affiliate links with product thumbnails and prices, as they can be used to generate e-commerce revenue.

Usage

Kinja is a personal web service that allows its users to "bookmark" blogs, Kinja providing the user with excerpts of recent posts of the chosen blogs. These excerpts, known as personal "digests", are compiled into one page of excerpts, with other categorized compilations available based on such labels as media, music, liberal, conservative, and more. A user's personal selection of digests is easily available to any outside user, allowing others to share their favorite blogs and recent blog posts. Utilizing a

webcrawler WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search. History Brian Pinker ...

dubbed Kinjabot (similar to Google's webcrawlers), Kinja creates an internal index of all available weblogs as defined by Kinjabot.

References

Sources

External links

* American news websites Gawker Media Internet properties established in 2004 News aggregators Former TelevisaUnivision subsidiaries {{news-website-stub