The New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian and other publications that were once great bastions of truth, have increasingly yielded their noble purpose of covering newsworthy events and matters, to ‘would-be’ articles that are all about increasing circulation and site traffic. While many other articles they provide are still relevant, purposeful and insightful, increasingly these are drowned out by fluffy op-ed pieces that frankly, no one wants to read.
If you’re tired of reading articles about God backing Argentina in the World Cup, new iPhone release-related rumors, or anything Miley Cyrus (short of an obituary), this app will be for you.
Newsworthy is an app that intelligently curates the news to deliver your daily dosage of unadulterated content without the fluff. Founded by Australian entrepreneur Mehran Granfar, the app builds itself to be the solution for news clips the same way Spotify is music. Using artificial intelligence Newsworthy’s users are analyzed to pin point their interests and then bubbles up the information that will most likely be the items they will be most interested in reading.
Not only will Newsworthy let you have a compacted list of articles that are relevant to your interests, the application also lets you follow knowledge leaders you admire. The published views (articles leaders have read) are also analyzed and organized, just as you would follow them on Twitter but with actual content that is prioritized with importance as a key differentiator (without all the noise).
In the application the newsworthiness of an article is determined principally by a user’s interact with the articles they themselves read within the app. In the similar way that Tinder allows users to swipe left and right for matches, Newsworthy employs a similar method to up or down vote the importance of an article.
According to Mehran Granfar, “the current mode of consuming news is largely comprised of scouring through social feeds and online publications, which can be an incredibly frustrating experience, owing to the fact that these sources tend to be littered with meaningless fluff-pieces or otherwise frivolous content.” Granfar has suggested that the root of this issue is two-fold: the first part, according to him, “is the decline in journalism in the pursuit of shares and likes.” The second, he suggests is the “increasing difficulty of discovering meaningful content within social feeds,” which he feels have become overcrowded by kitten,
‘American idol’ and dub-step videos.
At the core of the Newsworthy app is the answering of the question “whose opinion do you really trust?” Newsworthy scrapes out the articles you find the most interesting to build a place free of noise.