newsy.com: Here's a site designed to cope with the fragmentation and polarization of news sources: News from multiple points of view.

I'm taking a class in the business school at UAA that is an eye-opener. The professor is Ed Forrest and the class is CHANGE. He doesn't call it that, but I do. The official title is Current Marketing Issues Seminar. He was expecting 20, but got 76 enrollees, and moved the class into an amphitheatre lecture hall. Essentially, it's a big-picture look at societal change with the intent of explaining to marketers how to deal. He's divided the world into spheres: the new economy, the technosphere, the infosphere, the psychosphere, the bio/power sphere and, oh yes, THE FUTURE.

This week we were talking about the convulsions hitting the infosphere (read: your shrinking newspaper, the tendency to only subscribe to blogs you agree with, making you feel right all the time...).

The professor was worried about that last point. He had several slides in his PowerPoint about the danger of seeking only the view you prefer. "Ideological amplification" was the technical term, meaning "The abundance of information on the web, when coupled with filtering and personalization tools, will not only divide people, but will magnify their differences."

He quotes a study called "Divided They Blog" that showed that 91 percent of links off blogs remained within the ideological community.

"As people find people and information that supports their existing views, they become more convinced they are right -- and others are wrong -- and they become more confident and extreme."

Tea-baggers? Death panels? The echo chamber. Scary.

But then the professor grinned at us and said, "Leave it to the Internet to come up with a solution": www.newsy.com.

It's a start-up Web site still in beta. Its mission: take a big news story and provide perspectives from competing media.

Here's the pitch:

Newsy.com (http://www.newsy.com ) is a multiperspective online video news site that monitors, synthesizes and presents the world’s news coverage. Through short video segments available on the web, Newsy.com offers a way to accelerate the global understanding of a news story.

Like all successful businesses, Newsy.com is meeting a current demand in the marketplace. People increasingly want their news in quickly digestible bits, and more and more they want it online and through video. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spent on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video has climbed 339% over the same time period. News remains the #1 category type for content.

Of course, it has an iPhone app.

Here's a look at the top stories on its site and the sources it summarized for viewers:

Michael Moore and his health care reform threat to Congress if they don't act:
The Daily Beast, Washington Post, CNN, Politico, The Huffington Post.

Iran's Two Nuclear Facilities:
CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, TIME, Press TV, Iria, AFP, Russia Today.

Positive steps toward cure for HIV/AIDS:
BBC, CNN, Washington Post, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, Fox News.

I just found out about it tonight, so I haven't had a chance to evaluate it. I will over the next few days and get back to you. I'd also invite people interested in reliable news and information to take a look and report back on what they see.

I'm also heading off to a journalism conference this weekend, where I expect a lot of panic and sessions on social media. I'll report back on that, too.