News apps are dying, and notifications are killing them.
News alerts now give readers everything they need right on the lock screen, so why open apps anymore? Here are 8 ideas for making them worth opening again.
You may not have noticed (because honestly, there were plenty of reasons to be distracted this year), but 2016 was the year that news alerts started looking a lot more like news apps.
Think about the last news alert you received on your phone. Did it have a headline, a photo or a GIF? Did it let you save it for later, or rate it? News alerts are getting richer to the point that it’s time to have a conversation about what the purpose of an app is if you can get everything you need to experience a news story on your lock screen.
“…it’s time to have a conversation about what the purpose of an app is if you can get everything you need to experience a news story on your lock screen.”
Some forward-thinking publishers are even betting that notifications are all you’ll ever need or want from them, while some user experience designers plead with publishers to send less alerts (maybe none!). Most everyone else is caught somewhere in between.
It’s becoming clear that news alerts have been a quietly competitive space for a while. Over the past year and a half, Facebook and Twitter have even tried to disrupt it. Facebook attempted to aggregate news alerts for you in its Notify app, which lasted seven months before shutting down over the summer. Twitter recently started sending experimental breaking news alerts to select users based on a topical algorithm, linking to curated sets of Twitter Moments. Many received one yesterday, about Carrie Fisher’s death.
But if publishers and app-makers like Mic, Quartz and Breaking News are all ahead of the curve by recognizing the importance and power of the news alert format (even BuzzFeed News archives its alerts in-app, h/t Madeline Welsh), and if alerts continue on their trajectory of becoming more and more app-like, what new kind of apps can publishers build that provide actual value?
As my mobile lab colleague Connor Jennings said when thinking about a future where news might be read only on the lock screen and not in an app, “but it would be such a shame to waste [the app] space.”
So here are a few ideas for what news apps of the future could be, if we decided to move beyond lists of undifferentiated headlines and well-hidden preference settings.
A news app could be:
- A space dedicated solely to conversation around news stories.
- A place to access in-depth reporting about both sides of an issue.
- A place to access deep background information and reporter research.
- Simple access to a publisher’s archives.
- A place to actively personalize your news alert topics (i.e. Mic).
- A place to see stories that let you multitask (i.e. watch & read).
- A home for custom content like interactives, data visualization & quizzes.
- A home for enterprise pieces or series with custom navigation schemes.
What do you think, and what is missing from this list? Please add your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
