If you take a meta view of the offerings of the search engines, Google and Bing, or a platform like Facebook you see they are becoming propaganda vehicles, a tendency exacerbated by the algos deciding that if you click on CNN once that is what you get on every single story 'til the end of days.
Whereas in reality all you wanted was the "Cat saves family" story.
There are thousands of news sources that simply get buried by the choices imposed by the current purveyors.
And that's just from the consumer point of view.
From the publisher side of the table they are forced to confront, on a second-by-second basis the problem that has plagued sources of gossip, news, insight etc, for centuries "I've got a secret that you should/would pay for but if I tell you what it is you won't need to pay for it."
With all that in mind, here's one approach, flawed in many ways but attempting to tackle some of the problems.
The headline story is from August, no longer news but a decent lead-in to SmartNews.
From TechCrunch, August 4, 2019:
TechCrunch followed up on September 16th with "SmartNews’ latest news discovery feature shows articles from across the political spectrum".A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn.Japan Post Capital led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest LP.
The company, founded in Tokyo in 2012, boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan. Growing at a rate of 500% per year, its audience checks into the app for a mix of political, sports, global and entertainment news curated for each individual reader. To make money, the company sells inline advertising, video ads and deals with publishers to sell ads against “SmartViews,” its equivalent of Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant Articles.
SmartNews has nearly 400 U.S. publishing partners, including The Associated Press and Bloomberg. It competes with the likes of Apple, which unveiled Apple News + earlier this year, a subscription news product that offers access to more than 300 magazines and newspapers for $9.99 per month.....MORE
And on September 30 with one of their Crunch Extra's:
SmartNews’ head of product on how the news discovery app wants to free readers from filter bubbles
On October 25th Digiday had a mini-feature:Since launching in the United States five years ago, SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn status, has quietly built a reputation for presenting reliable information from a wide range of publishers. The company straddles two very different markets: the U.S. and its home country of Japan, where it is one of the leading news apps.SmartNews wants readers to see it as a way to break out of their filter bubbles, says Jeannie Yang, its senior vice president of product, especially as the American presidential election heats up. For example, it recently launched a feature, called “News From All Sides,” that lets people see how media outlets from across the political spectrum are covering a specific topic....MUCH MORE
‘There’s clarity around what you’ll make’: SmartNews is paying publishers to be on its platform
While earlier this year NiemanLab gave the company half-an-attaboy:
SmartNews has shown it can drive traffic. Can it drive subscriptions too?
So, we'll see how this all works out and in the meantime keep relying on LexisNexis and DeepDyve and the other specialist services along with Factiva, ProQuest, Contify and some 1300 feeds and terminals.
