Everyone’s Making News Apps But No One Knows The Right Way To Read Them
Traders read a newspaper story about the five hundred thirteen point loss yesterday at the Fresh York Stock Exchange on September 1, one thousand nine hundred ninety eight REUTERS
The news business is flourishing right now, at least online. Critics consider web journalism to be a thriving business but this latest trend could be responsible for the influx of news apps flooding the market.
Everyone seems to be attempting to build their own program and revolutionize the way we read news on our phones or tablets. Re/code’s Peter Kafka wrote that former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is pitching a mysterious project to newspapers and magazines while Facebook is debuting a fresh app called Paper on Monday.
While this could make most people believe there’s hope for this fighting industry, most of these apps are going to fail.
They Need To Figure Out A Way To Make Money
Nick D’Aloisio became a millionaire when he was 15. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett
Companies have invested a lot of money in news apps.
Circa, the social news app co-founded by Matt Galligan, has acquired $Three.41 million in funding according to CrunchBase.
Despite this, the apps are free to download and don’t require a subscription to read more stories. It is entirely free for anyone to use.
Legacy outlets like The Fresh York Times have built paywalls onto mobile platforms but apps like the ones mentioned above don’t have enough of a reputation to warrant charging a fee for readers to come back and view their content.
Advertising has grown increasingly significant for most publications but when they are crammed into the petite screen on a mobile device, it ruins the reading practice.
This brief trend will fizzle out if companies don’t recognize that news apps can be a financial black crevice. A system needs to be created that benefits readers and investors.
Developers Can’t Figure Out The Best Delivery System For News
Yahoo News Digest tells readers the next time they’ll be able to access the next set of stories. iTunes
Two common themes can be found in the latest slate of news apps that have launched in the past month. They are are designed well but essentially tell you the stories you want to read with some level of customization.
Apps like Inwards.com permit users to create a feed following stories related to their private interests. This is a similar function found on Flipboard, the app that lets you create digital magazines of certain topics like cars or cooking.
D’Aloisio’s app drops off a digest of nine stories every morning and evening. Each article is from a different category of news.
Visually, these apps look fine but the flaw is in the delivery. None of this content is original. The articles that you’ll read are collected from other sources.
Plus, developers build algorithms that collect data from social media profiles. Based on the information gleamed from a few outdated tweets and Facebook updates, the app thinks it has a good idea of the topics that we’re interested in. That’s hard to believe.
These Apps Need To Get More Creative Or They Will All Meet A Painful End
The marketplace is getting too crowded for applications that do the exact same thing. Most of them are going to meet a painful end if they don’t come up with a creative solution to sustain.
Request needs to be generated in order to have these apps build up popularity. Developers need to create a compelling argument for why it needs to be read. With so much information available online, it’s raunchy to be able sit down and read everything regardless if a story is spruced up with sleek visuals. One suggestion would be attempt and create a profitable mobile newsroom. This experiment would involve crafting stories that would be sent to directly to phones and tablets instead of just aggregating information that pops up across the web.
If web journalism is thriving, mobile news needs more time to develop.