The one where we explain our solution.
Last week we spent a few thousand words and a whole horde of Friends GIFs explaining why the news industry is horribly broken. Then, at the end, we promised a possible solution — so here it is.
By the way, if you missed last week’s article, find it here.
Tl;dr: Rather than just copy every other news app we tried to do things a bit differently. We spoke to hundreds of students to find out the annoying problems they had, and decided to try and fix those. It seems to have worked.
Over 50% of our beta users are using Compass every single day. Not bad when the average for a news app is 25%. We might have even figured out a way to make journalism sustainable. Now we just need your help to make it happen.
Once again, it’s gonna be a long read, but if you bear with us, you’ll get to the final episode.
Episode 4— The one where we actually had to speak to people.
First thing was first. We had to make sure no one had already fixed the problems ailing the news industry, without us noticing. And with literally everyone in the media world putting out an app of their own, there were plenty of potential candidates.
So we looked at a lot of them. Apps from Britain, apps from America, even apps from Japan. Apps by newspapers, apps by TV stations, and, of course, apps by would-be Silicon Valley media messiahs.
And a few did some cool things. Things we took onboard. Still, it seems like no one had really cracked it. If you want proof, just try and think of that one news app that everyone you know uses.
It’s hard right?
So instead we decided to build from the ground up. The old fashioned way. We went out and talked to our friends, face to face. Then we talked to their friends. Then we headed out to universities and spoke to to hundreds of students. We asked them all the same questions: how they felt about journalism, how they used it, and whether they cared about it in the first place.
A few things kept cropping up:
“Why doesn’t my news app work on the tube, or when I’m out of data?”
“Why do I need to spend shitloads of money, when I pay a fiver for all the songs in the world?”
“Why do I need to read 25 news stories just to find out what’s going on today, especially if they all say roughly the same thing?”
“I get this filter bubble thing is a problem. Really, I do. Why don’t you give me a way to fix it rather than just constantly talking about how bad it is?”
We got the point(s).
Episode 6— The one where we start to build something cool.
We now had an idea of the kind of problems we needed to solve — so our job became figuring out solutions to these annoying issues.
Turns out this part was pretty damn hard, but fast forward six months, much stress and multiple versions of the app later, we think we’re getting pretty close.
Why do we think that?
Well, it’s simple really. For the last few weeks we’ve been running a beta with just under a thousand people. Most of them are under the age of 24. And here’s the weird thing, these testers seem to love it. We’re not going to bore you with all the numbers but the key metric for any news app always seem to be the percentage of people that come back every day. For most major news apps it hovers around 25% and anything above that is considered to be pretty special. Ours? Well, as of yesterday, we’re at 50%.
It’s at the point where we’re genuinely excited to get it into the wild but seeing as you’ve read this far, it only seems fair to give you a sneak peek at some of the things we do differently.
Some features people seem to love
Breaking the news?
First off, we realised that no news app worth its salt would ever work without being a place for, well, news.
And as stupid as that may sound, it’s actually quite an important point. Because in the age of Twitter, the era of the 24-hour news cycle, we could never hope to be a source for genuinely breaking news.
Realistically someone, whether it’s the AP, Reuters or even the BBC will always beat us to reporting the story. Our job isn’t so much telling you what’s happening as soon as it happens; it’s to help you understand why and how it’s happening.
But we’re not totally blind to the value of, you know, actual news. That’s why we built our ‘Get Your Bearings’ feature — a constantly updated set of brief, 100-word explainers on the events, issues and personalities shaping each day’s news cycle. A quick way to swipe through the key stories of the day in just a couple of minutes.
We want to bring our users the best in depth journalism on the planet. Stories that explain the why, not just the what. But we want to do it without losing sight of the the major events driving that storytelling in the first place.
But wait, there’s more.
Perspectives
Remember last week, when we talked about the weird things that happen when Facebook algorithms start to determine our news diets? People end up pretty much exclusively seeing news and views tailored to their political prejudices, creating a self-reinforcing ideological filter bubble that insulates us from the disagreeable half of reality.
We realised that this is something we were desperate to fix and so we’re pleased to introduce our ‘Perspectives’ feature. We take the issues of the day and we group together the takes on those issues. Liberal and conservative. Right and left.
It’s one of those things that’s quite difficult to explain but incredibly easy to show so here’s yet another gif:
Pretty cool right?
Episode 7— The one where we point out the elephant in the room.
So we think we might have built a useful news app. If you’re someone who wants to know about what’s really going in the world, but doesn’t have hours to trawl through Twitter to find out, we have just the thing for you.
There is just one problem. A problem we couldn’t easily get around.
You’ll have to pay for it.
Because ultimately, good journalism costs money. It’s inconvenient and it’s a bit cliche. But it’s also true. And another inconvenient truth about journalism is that advertising is never going to be able to provide that money.
It’s probably easiest to explain this through an example. In 2013, the Guardian, with the help of a lowly US government contractor called Edward Snowden, published a series of stories about how the NSA and GCHQ were illegally spying on virtually everyone and gathering private information on a scale almost no one had previously imagined. You might have heard of it.
In any case, it was one of the biggest journalistic scoops of the last decade and, as of 2014, it was the most read Guardian story of all time, clocking in at a cool 4,000,000 readers.
If the Guardian had monetised that traffic using Instant Articles, Facebook’s way of helping publishers monetise, we calculated they’d have turned one of the most important pieces of journalism since Watergate into about $10,000 in ad revenue. That might just have been enough to cover a few days worth of legal expenses for the story.
So we realised we would have to charge for what we built. Luckily, if we could get enough people paying, we wouldn’t have to charge much. In fact, a few pounds would be enough. After months of research, we realised we could get away with charging £5 a month for the average person and just £3 a month for students. Plus, we could even make sure people got free access for the first month.
We get that it feels weird to pay for journalism. But it’s also weird to live in a world where any politician can pass off a bit of news that makes them look bad as ‘fake’. We realised we would have to offer people a choice. Either we all continue to watch journalism wither and die or stump up a little bit of cash and actually pay to keep the lights on for reporters to hold politicians to account.
Episode 8 — The one where we ask for your help
So there you have it: Compass News.
We’d love to think it’ll be the the tool you use not only to discover what’s going on in the world, but also to discover new stories and new ideas. Perspectives that can expand your worldview and change your mind. A place with no clickbait or advertorials. In short, a place where it’s easy to experience great journalism.
We think we’ve built a pretty cool app and website, at least based on what other people have said.
Now the ball is in your court. If you think this is a problem worth solving we would love your support.
To begin with, we’re launching at just five universities in the UK: Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, Warwick and York. We’re going live on Friday. If you’re a student there just go to www.compassnews.co.uk or download the app (sign up with your university email.)
If you’re not a student, but like what we’re doing, sign up to our waiting list and you’ll be able to squeeze in early. We’ll be opening up to more and more people in the coming months, and every few weeks we’ll be adding a few hundred people from our waiting list to the main site.
Thanks so much for reading this far and we’re super excited to have you on our team.
See you on the other side.
