Digg launched a new social news discovery function called Newswire on Monday.

Newswire “gives you the tools to shape the breaking stories on Digg,” according to the social news site’s blog. Unlike other areas on Digg, the Newswire updates news in real-time — as stories are submitted, they appear in the “Recent” section within Newswire. As they are Dugg, stories move up in the “Trending” section within Newswire.

As the company notes on its blog, the key to picking the top stories on Digg is finding them. This tool was created to help alleviate the pain of sifting through a ton of subpar content to find the diamonds. Instead, users will find the most recent submissions in “Recent” and the most popular stories in “Trending.”

Popularity is calculated “by looking at how many Diggs, Likes and Tweets [a story] has, who has Dugg it, when it was submitted, the past quality of similar stories, and a handful of other signals,” according to Digg’s blog.

The Newswire feed can be customized by focusing search results with the following pieces of information:

• By “Recent” or “Trending” stories
• By type of media, including images, videos or text (or all stories)
• By number of Diggs (“more than” or “less than” a certain number of Diggs)
• By topic, such as business, entertainment, technology, etc.

To further the transparency of how news is developing, the Newswire also features an activity feed in the right column, as well as on its own page.

Digg has been facing hard times — founder Kevin Rose left the company earlier this year, the site has faced plummeting traffic, competitor site Reddit has been benefiting from Digg’s decline and the company made major staff cuts late last year.

This new feature could be a positive blip in Digg’s history, or it could just be another update gone unseen. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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