Not just another news app
Now that I’m in my final year at university, I’ve dealt with my fair share of people trying to convince me to download their new app (students, it seems, make the perfect guinea pigs) and Compass News was one of them.
As a student, I seem to always be on the move — finding time to sit down and read a non-essay-related article is rare. What’s good about Compass News is that it shows the reading time, and that means that when I have an odd five minutes, waiting for a lecture or when a friend is late for coffee, I can just pick an article with a short reading time to fill the gap. It’s never a good feeling realising that you’re only a quarter of the way through an article you’ve already been reading for ten minutes.
The problem with a lot of journalism at the moment is that the market is oversaturated. It drives publications to use increasingly clickbait-y titles which don’t accurately represent the topic of the article. It can make it impossible to find good content, especially if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. Compass News filters through all of it — fake news and all — and just picks the most interesting and relevant stuff. If an article appears on Compass News it has already passed through a selection process to ensure that it is worth the reader’s time.
A lot of my year at university has been consumed by student journalism meaning I have to be very up to date. Not only on the news, but also on the what the wider media are saying about it. Rather than individually checking lots of different news sites, checking Compass News tends to cover everything important that’s being said.
The curators always seem to capture what interests students while saving us the tedious job of combing through the clickbait. Having spent a week interning as one of their curators, I can confirm that there is a lot of clickbait. By capturing students’ interests, Compass News has also helped me come up with ideas for commissions for articles for the student newspaper I’m involved with. If a lot of news outlets have something to say on a topic, at least one overly-opinionated Oxford student will too.
The app also allows you to become very knowledgeable about subjects very quickly which can come in really handy at a university filled with people desperately trying to prove their academic worth. After five minutes looking over summaries, stories so far, and collections (which show the timeline of events on topics ranging from the Trump-Russia scandal to the feuds of Taylor Swift), you can just about hold your own in most conversations.
I’ve spent a term being a brand ambassador for Compass News (if you ever want a Compass sticker, hit me up) and have recently finished a curation internship with them. There are far more articles than I imagined that have to be sorted through each day so I’m a little in awe of how the curators manage it. I’ve learnt how to spot an article worth publishing, how to quickly pick out its most important points worth summarising, and a lot about some very niche topics — from the finger-cutting traditions of the Japanese version of the mafia to China’s bootcamps for internet addiction.
With final exams looming this year, it will be much more hectic than the last. Reading any articles for fun (rather than for my degree) is usually the first thing to get sacrificed, especially when it can be so hard to figure out what is worth reading. Given that the app helps to solve this problem, as well as saving time, this kind of reading won’t be sacrificed as easily as before.
