New paper / Yahoo can present top news but journalists … / The Conversation / 27.02.2014

Yahoo has launched a new app aimed at making reading the news easier. News Digest is the latest invention from Nick D’Aloisio, Yahoo’s 18-year-old recruit who found fame with Summly, another app that takes the chore out of reading the news.

The idea of News Digest is to offer users short bursts of the top stories of the day and is the latest attempt to solve the problem of how we keep ourselves informed in the modern day. We get such a vast quantity of information thrown at us but struggle to balance it against quality.

Instead of continuously updating, the app only delivers two editions a day to avoid the constant barrage of information online. That’s a refreshing change and makes me hopeful that Yahoo is as sick of the barrage of information on social media as many of us are. But ultimately, whether this app is any good or not will depend on the quality of the journalism behind it. Quality should not be measured by the standards of social media and web information aggregators but by the classical standards of journalistic rigour and integrity.

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