There was a time in the United States when anything that called into question moral clarity, the black and white of a clear perspective on right and wrong, was deeply distrusted – if not actively shut down. Seeing the world through other peoples’ eyes was considered not an essential act of empathy but a slippery slope into drug use, homosexuality and communism.
Fortunately, brave pioneers of intellectual freedom helped us bust out of the 1950’s and begin to appreciate the world in all its rich and painful complexity and subjectivity. As of today, with the launch of News.me on the iPad – there’s now an app for that. (iTunes Link) A collaboration between the New York Times and the data wonks at URL shortener Bitly, News.me shows you the news from other peoples’ perspectives – and other people are very different from ourselves! I have found it quite appealing to use for the last several months – it’s been one of my very favorite ways to learn about the world using my iPad. Even before launch, hundreds of publishing partners are intrigued as well. It’s a strikingly new model for both users and publishers.
The Business of Your News, for Me
News.me has been eagerly anticipated by media-watchers for months. Prototyped by engineers at the New York Times, bought and built out by Betaworks (the Times now owns equity in Bitly) with data and interface rock-stars from Bitly and contracted friends, the app is a substantially new type of news consumption experience. The team behind it hopes consumers will appreciate it enough to pay for it at 99 cents a week or $34.99 for the year. The revenue will be split with publishers whose content is displayed in the app, on a per-click basis. Billing is done automatically through iTunes, weekly or yearly. There’s a free one-week trial.
“We have no interest in taking ads in any form,” says John Borthwick, CEO of Bitly and Betaworks. Borthwick says that more than 660 publishing partners are already participating. (Including ReadWriteWeb, the editorial department found out yesterday.)
Participating publishers range from the Guardian to the Associated Press to Al Jazeera to the Portland, Oregonian to the Bangkok Post in Thailand. A wide range of local, national and international publications are participating.
Borthwick believes that advertising-supported content is not suitable for the tablet experience and argues that a new business model is required.
But will users pay for it?
Above: Read the news over your shoulder, Esther? I’d be honored!
An Eye Opening App
What News.me offers is a strikingly original app. Open it up and you’ll find a line of faces you can swipe left or right. Those are your friends or recommended people who have opted-in to sharing their subscriptions on the News.me platform. You cannot read the streams of people who have not opted in.
View Bit.ly data scientist Hilary Mason’s stream on News.me and you’ll see a flow of super-geeky articles shared by the people she’s following on Twitter: articles about statistics, data mining and social networking from a qualitative perspective.
View Microsoft youth social network researcher danah boyd on News.me and you’ll see something very different: anthropological articles about young people online, cyberbullying, teenage self-expression, mobile tech user studies.
Click on one of those faces and you’ll see a news feed of articles open. It may not look like the newsfeed of links and articles you’ve subscribed to for yourself on Twitter, though. Instead, what you’ll be shown is a river of news shared by the people on Twitter that your selected person has chosen to follow.
Those people know and follow different people than you do. Some people curate who they follow on Twitter very carefully and their News.me feeds are particularly distinct.
View Bit.ly data scientist Hilary Mason’s stream on News.me and you’ll see a flow of super-geeky articles shared by the people she’s following on Twitter: articles about statistics, data mining and social networking from a qualitative perspective.
View Microsoft youth social network researcher danah boyd on News.me and you’ll see something very different: anthropological articles about young people online, cyberbullying, teenage self-expression, mobile tech user studies.
At the end of each article News.me offers a list of other articles you might like. Borthwick believes that the experience also offers a meaningful antidote to the age-old dilema of internet-as-echo-chamber. The app makes it remarkably easy to find yourself reading content published and shared by people with world-views different than your own.
Seeing the online world through different peoples’ perspectives is a remarkably unique way to experience news consumption. Is it something that a large number of people will appreciate enough to pay for? I don’t know.
The app has a strong, clean visual design (thanks to the work of Justin Ouellette, best known for Muxtape), it’s an ad-free experience, it’s fast loading (there’s P2P style-magic going on in the background) and it’s got a fundamentally new model of user experience.
I hope enough other people find it compelling enough to make it a viable business – I certainly enjoy using it a lot myself. I am concerned that too few people may appreciate the empathetic experience of viewing the world through other people’s eyes – otherwise society would likely be quite different.
Maybe we were all just waiting for the iPad app for such an experience, though.
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.
See Betaworks CEO John Borthwick speak about Designing Products and Businesses for the Emerging Web at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit NYC June 13-14.
