NBC will shut down the Breaking News app | Hacker News Reader

NBC will shut down the Breaking News app

niemanlab.org

47 pointsvit0533 comments

I have more questions now...

1. Why was this app created?

2. How expensive is it to run this app? (no seriously, even at scale, I can't see this getting more expensive than a few thousand $ a month - which at NBC's level should not be too much of an issue?)

They can't monetize it and because they want people to read their paper instead (watch ads), they shut it down. At least that's what I make of this reading those tweets.

it'd be easier to push ads on-to the app (or the app to load the news article as a webview with ads in it).

^ more views, more money and probably more profits.

I doubt the hosting was the big cost, probably paying the journalists to pick the stories, write a quick summary, and get the alerts out as fast as possible. (Not a user of the app, but didn't seem like an automated AI type of thing.)

You are correct. It's not cheap to have 24 hour breaking news coverage globally. They did a great job on weeding out hoaxes too, it was a pretty remarkable service.

I believe the @breakingnews Twitter account existed well before the app. I imagine NBC News committed to the brand based on its Twitter following before it evolved into an app.

I don't see why editorial responsibilites couldn't be a little more decentralized to lower costs. Give a number of editors Breaking News-level access in their CMS and check a box when a story fits the criteria. But NBC isn't in it for the public good. The app probably simply didn't generate enough revenue to justify the costs.

> I can't see this getting more expensive than a few thousand $ a month

You aren't accounting for staff time. All software is a living organism, they can't just lay off the developers and expect it to keep working.

Funny--the app being shut down is announced in a series of tweets, the last one being:

"Stay tuned for more later, including details on how you can hire the best mobile/social talent in the business."

(presumably their own mobile app development talent...)

This was always the first app to send me an alert when news happened often by a long time. I always wondered why they didn't charge for that, it's the kind of thing I'd happily pay what I no longer spend on a newspaper for to get. Though I must admit, the last time I routinely bought a newspaper it was $0.35 a copy. and $0.75 on Sunday. $2.85 a week, and no coupons, or ads which in a newspaper were part of the value so I'd easily pay $1 a week.

I'm sad to hear about this. The Breaking News app became one of the most used apps on my phone. The push alerts for emerging stories were always sent out before any of the other major news apps. This service will be missed.

Closest thing I've found is https://twitter.com/BNONews which is run by the original founder of @BreakingNews on Twitter, which was sold and later became the app and NBC service.

Curation is what I am after. Breaking News had (presumably) a large team monitoring vast numbers of Twitter accounts and other news feeds to bring them together into a single place where you got a nice feed of important stories without being overwhelmed with all the noise of thousands of individual tweets.

Am I missing something? Why would they build an app to consume a twitter feed? I guess that's what someone who actually knew what the heck they were doing said when they asked why they were spending a bunch of money on the app. It's amazing how much money can be wasted at a corporation because it's other people's money.

If they're anything like the place I work at it comes down to mindshare. Yes, it's just consuming a Twitter feed and maybe some other proprietary datasource but some exec "needed" an app because then our logo (icon) is on the phone's screen. It's visible and quick for people to access the news feeds instead of going elsewhere.

Sadly, most of the decisions we question are driven by marketing.

Having been pretty close to many mobile apps that came out of NBC in the early boom days, I can confirm that this was the case for many/most of the apps I ever touched. Most of them were pretty bad, just RSS driven web pages in a native wrapper. Getting the brand onto users' devices was the primary goal, experience be damned. I can't speak to Breaking News, that was a different team.

The Twitter feed is a sub-set of their content and postings.

You should have checked out the app, it's pretty great. You get push alerts on the topics you want and [optionally] where you are located. You can also use it to report breaking news and as a result they had a nice jump on a lot of stories like Earthquakes and the like.

Hmm, it's unfortunate that this is being shut down. If you're looking for alternatives, I've been using the New York Times app, CNN, and Buzzfeed News. You need to deal with some annoying notifications (for example, CNN sent me a "Hero of the Year" notification today), but it's better than nothing.

Well I think you're a hero!

The Guardian also has a good app. And good journalism, too.

Or just use the DuckDuckGo app.

I'm already aware of the content of ever MSM feed, no matter the platform. At least 50% is complete opinion pieces questioning every choice and sentence spoke by the POTUS-elect, at least one article giving false hope that the election could still be over-turned, an article about how hot Ryan Reynolds or Ryan Gosling is, an article that is just a video (or recap) of SNL mocking said POTUS elect, an extremely vague article about why the Obama's where so amazing, and one buried article about something new and interesting that most people should be aware of.

Hmm I'm sensing some bias in your comment...

Well, check out basically any news source besides Fox, which I don't care for either, and tell me how I'm wrong. I'm not a Trump supporter, but MSM has become identical to Facebook news feed. It's popular opinions dressed up as news. I don't feel like it's informing me of much.

They're not going to get much traction with the Fake News narrative if they don't enact some real change on their part. If I'm wrong and there's a news source out there that isn't comprised of this, I'd appreciate you guys pointing me to it.

Yup. That's the "news" today.

hmm thanks for this, i didn't know I needed this till now :)

Quite an ironic decision by NBC. At the same time the consumption of news from mainstream outlets is falling, they decide to shutter a service which was gaining in popularity instead of working out ways to monetize it.

https://virwire.com

Breaking and trending news curation continues to elude much of the the MSM, we created Virwire to solve critical automation and bias issues.

I opened it and a Daily Mail story was on the top. IMO, that's a good sign "bias issues" are hardly solved.

Thanks for checking us out!

Virwire prioritizes news based on what people are consuming and not on editorial agenda.

Bias is subjective to say the least, but do you want the media telling you what you should read?

By filtering articles via social signals Virwire exposes all sides of the 'story' and trusts readers to sort out the bs. We believe 'people' are smarter than we give them credit for.

> Virwire exposes all sides of the 'story' and trusts readers to sort out the bs. We believe 'people' are smarter than we give them credit for.

Well HN isn't really a place for jokes and that sure is one if I've ever seen one. People don't care to sort out the BS, they share/read/click on things that reinforce their existing viewpoints and/or bias. It's like putting healthy food and candy on a table and letting lose kids into the room and saying "I'm sure they will pick the nutritionally sound and healthy options".

> We believe 'people' are smarter than we give them credit for.

We literally have a wealth of evidence to contest this. For example: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey

I going to believe that you are being ironic, quoting Buzzfeed as your single source of truth :)

Buzzfeed cites a study, links to the results and calculations, and gives good detail on the methodology, sample size, etc.

They've also been using their clickbait revenues to do some great long-form journalism, like https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/a-matter-of-time.

You're really not selling me on your ability to solve bias issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com