Choosing a News App for your Telephone

About a month ago, I deleted the first news app downloaded to my new smart phone and replaced it with more useful ones.

            This was part of my goal of reducing the time I spent staring at the small screen on my telephone; I can get more effective news from many other mediums. The change of news apps and some other planned changes have saved me somewhere between 1 ½ to 2 hours a day.

            I began the time-saving project by examining how I was using the phone.

I admit to being a news junkie. I have degrees in journalism and spent my life as organizational/corporate news and information provider. Even in the Army, I served as an Army Journalist/Information Specialist.

With my smart phone, I was spending way too much time trying to find actual news on  my original news app. I found the principles of good journalism ignored, pandering at high levels, and commercial promotion hidden within editorial content.

In total, my original news app was more like a supermarket tabloid than a solid news source with outrageous headlines, little actual editorial support, and often ridiculous content I would never read in a national grocery store tabloid.

I’m disappointed I was lulled into accepting an electronic “tabloid” and got hooked on it.

In my original news feed, the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” of the summary lead was non-existent. The purpose of many items was to pull people in via a pandering lead and hold them seemingly forever to increase their exposure to ads and other promotions.

If and when one finally gets to the information promised by the headline, there was poorly written content with paragraphs repeating themselves and no legitimate final explanation.

The pandering was a major problem because if one clicked on one item, the app noted the person’s interest and began to load more and more similar stories in response.

The bottom line here is that clicking on a headline like “Samatha-Rae Starlet Wows in Nearly Nude Bikini”, the reader is likely to read paragraph after paragraph of vague content, ladened with heavy emphasis on her soon to be released movie, and may not even see a photo of a more modestly dressed Samatha-Rae.

The original app’s treatment of more mainstream news was equally dismal.

I finally chose BBC and Associated Press news apps and try to restrict my reading them to their first three to five items and only check them once or twice a day.