Conceding that online readers want a smorgasbord of news rather than a limited menu, the Los Angeles Times is developing a new Web site that would include content from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other rival news sources.

Los Angeles Times NewsPoint will be one of the first “news aggregator” sites affiliated with a major publisher when it launches next month.

The move comes as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. are drawing thousands of readers daily with news.yahoo.com and news.google.com, searchable news sites that take content from hundreds of sources that include newspapers, television station Web sites, Web logs, wire services and trade publications.

“The notion of people getting news from one limited source just doesn’t apply any more in this media universe,” said New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “There’s going to be a big period of adjustment ahead for the major news players.”

The Los Angeles Times, like many papers, has operated a Web site since the mid-1990s that now includes content from the print newspaper, wire services and the Times’ dedicated online news staff.

With NewsPoint, the Times is moving into the mix-and-match world of news aggregators, which cull stories, photos and even audio and video from thousands of sources selected either by human editors or automated search engines.

The Times is developing NewsPoint in conjunction with Consenda LLC, a Swiss-American company that also is developing a news aggregator for The Guardian, a leading British newspaper.

Officials at the Times, which is owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., declined to discuss their plans for NewsPoint in detail. Xavier Ferguson, chief executive of Consenda, said the company would not comment until NewsPoint is announced.

Rob Barrett, general manager of the Times’ interactive division, wrote in an e-mail that the newspaper was looking forward to the launch. “We’re interested in trying multiple approaches … especially as our site and others come up with new and more targeted ways to distribute content,” Barrett wrote.

Aggregate or else
Like many news aggregators, NewsPoint relies on technology known as “Real Simple Syndication” or RSS. The technology combs thousands of Web sites for updated content, replacing out-of-date stories and photos with updated ones.

With RSS, users can filter articles according to their interests – in essence allowing them to create their own custom newspaper. For example, someone who lives in Pasadena, follows the Lakers and works in real estate can customize the Web site to deliver local Pasadena news stories, Lakers scores and columns and industry news about real estate – not exclusively from the Los Angeles Times but from other sources.

For years, newspaper publishers have resisted news aggregators while building up their own Web sites. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among other papers, allow Web site users to set preferences, but the stories are limited to content from the newspaper itself – not rival sources.

Google’s aggregator includes content from The New York Times and Los Angeles Times (but not the Wall Street Journal, which is limited to subscribers), as well as an array of other Web sites. Yahoo’s aggregator does not include stories from major newspapers.