In the past, because of the cost of purchasing a newspaper and the time required to watch TV news, even the well-informed had only a handful of news sources. But today, because of the abundance of free, advertising-supported, news online, the problem is how to choose which stories to read from all the free news websites.

Matt Drudge, of the well-known DrudgeReport.com, was one of the first to attack this problem by simply linking to interesting news articles, which he updated many times a day. Because news becomes old fast, often within hours, keeping a list of news links current is a major difficulty in for Drudge-style news portals.

The advantage the Drudge Report has over core news sites such as the Washington Post or Fox News is that Drudge links to many different news websites. Core news sites such as the Washington Post and Fox News usually link to their own stories. To sell more advertising, it’s in the both the Washington Post’s and Fox News’ interest to keep people reading their own sites.

Anyone, regardless of qualifications can start a Drudge-style news portal, as long as they are willing to put in the hours following the news 24/7 and updating their sites to keep news links current. Since people who have the time and inclination to follow news 24/7 are often a bit "eccentric," it’s the norm for people such as Matt Drudge to 1) have no qualifications to do anything else that would pay, 2) be politically biased, and 3) have bad, tabloid tastes. Fortunately for Matt Drudge, many people do like biased, tabloid news. While some Drudge-style sites are run by unbiased people with decent qualifications and tastes, these sites are run by one or a few editors.

Other sites have decided that having "elitist" (Matt Drudge?) editors choose the news is a top-down "fascist" organization, and crowdsource or democratize the editor’s work by allowing readers to vote on news stories. Digg.com is the most popular crowdsourcing news site and Reddit.com is another.

Crowdsourcing sites such as Digg.com have managed to eliminate the editor and all the problems of having an biased, unqualified, tasteless editor, but unfortunately it appears that crowds are just as biased, unqualified and tasteless as Matt Drudge, if not worse.

Democracy or "the wisdom of crowds" works politically, better than all other known political systems, because in elections, in effect, extremists on both the right and left cancel out each other’s votes and don’t have enough votes to reach a majority.

But with crowdsourcing sites, self-selected extremists are the only people who take the time to vote on articles that interest them. Who reads and votes for articles on Ron Paul? Who reads and votes on articles on marijuana legalization? Do these people like well-balanced articles that point out the advantages and disadvantages of Ron Paul or marijuana legalization? They are reading and voting for articles on how Ron Paul will save us from the "evil" Federal Reserve and how marijuana legalization will end crime and balance government budgets with marijuana taxes.

After wasting time reading biased, misleading, factually inaccurate articles on crowdsourcing sites, smart people leave. This is an example of the bad driving out the good. This leaves mostly true-believers promoting Ron Paul, marijuana legalization and dozens of other extremist causes on crowdsourcing sites.

In contrast to having a single human editor such as Matt Drudge or having the human crowd be the editor, Google News uses a non-human algorithm as the editor. Like its search engine, Google News strives to be unbiased by delegating the task to an algorithm.

Google does largely succeed in eliminating their own (Google employee) biases, by using external, non-Google links to rank and by using the same algorithm on all sites. But since the external links are sometimes from by biased people, Google has managed to capture the biases of the public. A Google Search on the term "Jew" leads to the racist website JewWatch; Google offers their explanation above this search result.

JewWatch is the most notable example of bad results from Google, but in short the problem is that computer algorithms are not smart enough to tell a good news story from a populist, misleading rant. Of course you can read the "story" and readily tell it’s a rant by some idiot, but why waste your time. Even worse are false stories which are deceptively convincing since you don’t know what to believe.

Shrewd.com takes a different approach; instead of trying to pick the best news stories, Shrewd.com makes it easier to click through to the home pages of the core news sites. Shrewd.com is little more than a list of the thirty best news websites where thirty professional, experienced editors each have selected the most important news to put on their home pages.

In other words, Shrewd.com solves the portal-editor problem by letting one quickly see the home page or front page of the most important news sites. One can customize Shrewd.com by adding links below the thirty best news sites. Common uses are adding local news websites and hobby sites for one-click access. For example, hikers can add Backpacker.com.