Online service reads the long stories so you don't have to

If The Walrus and the Atlantic and Harper's and the New Yorker are piling up, guilt-making and unread, you may be interested in a service called Brijit that essentially reads them for you, boils long-form journalism down to 100-word capsules and publishes it online.

While we don't normally plug commercial sites* for their own sakes, this one's motivation and rationale is interesting for what it says about us, as much as them.

We wish deep down that we were the kind of people who could read the Economist AND the New Yorker cover-to-cover every week, watch the Sunday morning political shows, and never miss an hour of This American Life. But we're not. And chances are, neither are you. Because who's got the time? And that's why we're building Brijit. Our mission is simple: make it easy for all of us to discover and access the world's best content, quickly, inexpensively and on our own terms.

Brijit wants users to "think of us as your well-read friend who leads you to that can't miss article, video clip or product." The virtual company describes itself as "a privately-owned, angel-financed online media startup with teams based in Washington, DC, Mountain View, CA and Beijing. The Company was founded in 2006 and employs a distributed team of editors and writers." Nice term, that, "distributed editors".

Anyone can sign up as a writer and then "claim" assignments that are posted on the site, although there may be multiple submissions among which the editors choose. Submitters are paid $5 for a written piece, $8 for a video piece. Every item has to meet a series of criteria, including a summary, a reason why they liked or hated it, a "star-rating" and tags.

Brijit uses a three-dot rating system. Three dots (which are said to be rare) indicate "exceptional must-reads, not to be missed", two means "special, worth making time for" and one means "worth reading if you have the time". Shadings of opinion allow for half-dots. Items are vetted and edited since these 100-word abstracts and ratings are reader-written and then reviewed by professional editors. It's not made absolutely clear how.

*One disturbing aspect of Brijit is that, sprinkled throughout the reader-written precis, in the same format and type, are Brijit-written paid-for promotional pieces for various magazines, items which link directly to Amazon.com. In other words, commercial messages are deliberately mixed in with the capsules summaries.

(Brijit may be the answer for the time-pressed, even if I wonder whether reading a precis keeps you from "missing" an article so much as avoiding having to read it; I recall that the purpose of Coles Notes was to avoid having to read the book. And I'm reminded of an acquaintance of mine years ago who said the videotape recorder was a miraculous invention: now he had a machine that would watch television for him while he got on with his life.)

[Thanks to This Magazine's blog for tipping us to this.]