Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Yahoo launches News Digest

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at CES 2014. Source: IDGNS

9 January 2014

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was on-hand at CES on Tuesday for the launch of a new app called Yahoo News Digest.

Now available in the App Store, News Digest pulls together snippets from around the Web and presents it in a twice-daily digest that Yahoo says is more readable than wading through the “tsunami” of news information available on the Web.

Mayer has worked hard to build up Yahoo’s profile as a media company, so it wasn’t a surprise to see her launch a news reading app.

Yahoo News Digest “simplifies news and cures the problem of information overload and ‘tl;dr,'” said Yahoo product manager Nick D’Aloisio, employing the abbreviation for “too long; didn’t read,” a popular rebuttal from people who are sent links online to something to read. D’Aloisio is the British teenager who developed the Summly technology acquired by Yahoo last year, which appears to be at the heart of the new app.

The articles in the digest are “algorithmically produced but editorially curated,” he said, without really explaining what that means, but suggesting that computers select the content, which then receives some human oversight.

The app has a clean look, with a single photograph from a current news event filling the home screen. Users can scroll through articles that are each made up of blocks of text pulled from different news sources reporting the same story.

There are links from the original articles at the bottom of the page, which presumably helps Yahoo avoid charges of copyright infringement for republishing other people’s content.

There are a finite number of articles, and readers are rewarded when they finish their digest with a message telling them they are ‘done’. That satisfactory sense of completion is missing from people’s online news experience today, according to D’Aloisio.

Mayer also announced that Yahoo will start to publish online magazines, with the first two being Yahoo Tech, edited by former New York Times columnist Pogue, and Yahoo Food.

They’ll shun banner ads and instead use ‘native content,’ which are articles provided by advertisers and styled to resemble other content in the magazine.

It’s a controversial way for publishers to make money. Critics say it makes it hard for readers to know when they are reading sponsored content, but Mayer said the native content will be clearly marked.

James Niccolai, IDG News Service
@jniccolai james_niccolai@idg.com

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