Exploring a local news aggregator
As I’ve mentioned in this spot before, one of my main connections to the emerging local news scene is the Webster on the Web blog maintained by my wife, Missy. She calls it a hobby, and pursues it as a creative outlet without trying to monetize it.
Nevertheless, it’s become a fixture in the local news firmament since she started in 2008. It averages about 150 page views each day. It’s not uncommon, however, for a post to get four or five times that many, with updates about local businesses and photo galleries of community events among the popular.
Lately she’s been noticing a fair amount of referral traffic from something called NewsBreak, which piqued my curiosity about what the site was, how it was finding her posts, and why it was linking to them.
It turns out that NewsBreak is a national aggregation site that’s trying to make inroads in the local news space, billing itself as “The Free 5-min Morning Local Newsletter.” Mashable and Lifewire within the past few months put NewsBreak in their top rankings for news apps. These lists included the likes of Apple News, Google News, and Flipboard, so that’s decent company. A report a few months ago in Digiday had the company quoted as claiming 45 million subscribers.
On the other hand NewsBreak didn’t get a very good review from the rating site Digital Trends.
In an effort to learn more, I created a NewsBreak account, put the app on my iPad, and went exploring with a search for news related to our Webster, NY, ZIP code.
The feed obviously was compiled with an algorithm, not human curation, which is not surprising. A couple of recent Webster on the Web posts were there, along with many other news stores largely drawn from broadcast news outlets and websites of local weekly newspapers.
I have to say I wasn’t terribly impressed at first. Much of the initial feed came not from our area but around New York state, including some that had a very clickbait-ish feel. But as I selected a few items and refreshed the feed a few times, the algorithm seemed to learn my preferences quickly. The items that appeared were not all from our town but still were reasonably local, either from neighboring communities or else more generic items such as health and education stories from Rochester TV stations. It’s not a stretch to say those qualify as local because our ZIP code is in their viewing area.
The feed wasn’t perfect, though; one of the top items on one refresh was an engagement announcement from a weekly paper in Orange County — which is about 40 miles from New York City and a little over 200 miles, as the crow flies, from Webster. And the presentation, while attractive and nicely assembled with tiles, still seemed rather random and chaotic with regard to story topics, geography, and how recently the items were published. The app offers no controls over any of those characteristics, either. Given an option I’d want things listed strictly newest first but NewsBreak has no way to select that.
Oddly, after seeing two recent posts from Webster on the Web during the first scan through the feed, I could never find them again. When I tried to follow Webster on the Web by going to a page offering that option, the site wasn’t featured and most of the ones that were suggested had no local tie. I have a suspicion — admittedly impossible to confirm — that these are paid promotions. Webster on the Web didn’t show up in a search, either.
So, while I’m pleased, of course, that NewsBreak is helping Missy’s work get more exposure, I won’t be making it part of my regular news habit. It just doesn’t offer enough functionality for surfacing local news I really want to see.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: journalism, local news, news aggregators, news coverage | Permalink.
Originally published at http://emergentjournalism.wordpress.com on February 1, 2022.
