How to make breaking news matter again
Breaking news is broken, and it’s only getting worse
If you ask your friends and neighbors about the state of journalism these days, they’ll inevitably start complaining about breaking news.
You’ll hear about the endless “breaking” coverage of the missing plane and mindless Justin Bieber alerts. How local TV news breathlessly rushes from one “breaking” crime story to the next. They’ll explain that breaking news is just an annoying marketing tactic designed to attract their attention. “That’s not breaking news!” is a common refrain.
They’re right: breaking news is broken, and it’s only getting worse.
There are two reasons why. First, as the world becomes more connected, the volume of breaking news and other real-time information has grown dramatically. Even your friends are sending you breaking news.
But the way breaking news is distributed hasn’t changed much in 50 years. Sure, you can get it in different places — social media and mobile phones — but it’s still broadcast to everyone without considering whether the story itself is uniquely important to you. Everyone is treated the same and spammed with the same news, regardless of how different we are.
Second, the battle for your attention has intensified to new heights. “We live in a perpetual state of emergency interrupt,” says Google X’s Astro Teller. “Human attention is the most precious commodity,” and everyone wants a slice of it. Red “breaking news” banners seem like they’re a permanent fixture along the bottom of your TV set, and push notifications rattle your phone with the most trivial of news.
We even made a video about it:
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to take back our attention and make breaking news matter again.
Asking the right question
When you ask journalists about the breaking news problem, we’ll often debate whether a given story is big enough to merit the “breaking news” label. But the better question is whether the story is important enough to each individual who will receive it.
For example, if a big story happens near you, it’s certainly “breaking news” to you but not necessarily #breaking to your Twitter followers who spend their time in different places. If there’s a big acquisition in your industry, you’d consider it “breaking news,” but your neighbors don’t need to know. If you’re saving up to buy a Tesla and the car company just announced a new model… and so on.
There’s a long tail of breaking news stories that matter to each of us in different ways. If we can anticipate what’s uniquely important to you, breaking news will matter more than ever. It will become a utility, not a promotional vehicle. It will respect your individual attention, and you’ll invite the interruption.
Not any easy problem to solve
Anticipating the breaking news that matters to an individual in real time is a unique challenge. Sometimes the most relevant breaking stories are unexpected. Just because something is trending among your social media friends doesn’t mean it’s breaking news to you. And sometimes the most viral breaking news is blown out of proportion — or worse, a hoax.
At the startup Breaking News, solving this unique problem is our obsession. When we began over four years ago, we began boiling down the ocean of breaking news into a single stream. We since added the ability to get push notifications for any of nearly 40,000 topics and ongoing stories — and mute anything you don’t want to see. And now, we’re taking another big step toward solving the breaking news problem: geolocation.
When news breaks near you
It stands to reason that the closer you are to a significant story that just happened, the more likely you’ll want to know about it. With breaking news stories, these events have a high likelihood of impacting you directly, or at the very least, that people around you will be talking about it.
A week ago, we launched a powerful new feature that’s a first for a mobile app: when a big story breaks near your physical location, we’ll send you a push alert with the news. We call it a “proximity alert,” and it’s now live in the Breaking News iOS app (Android coming soon.)
While it’s a simple feature, there is a lot of complexity behind the scenes. A proximity alert only triggers 1) when there’s a significant story breaking at a location 2) you’re inside the story’s “impact zone.”
For example, we sent three proximity alerts as tornadoes ravaged Nebraska this week. One alert was sent at 4:52 PM ET to Stanton County, which includes the town of Pilger, warning of a tornado on the ground. Minutes later, most of the town was destroyed.
Weather is one of the most obvious applications of proximity alerts, but there are many other stories with a public safety component. For example, we sent a proximity alert to San Leandro, California after police issued a “shelter in place” warning as they searched for a suspect. We also tested the alerts with two school shootings, a wildfire evacuation, a train fire with evacuations and a mandatory boil water order.
The impact of a nearby story can also entail an intense curiosity and traffic disruptions. When a building exploded in East Harlem, New York, we sent a proximity alert to our beta testers in New York City moments after we verified the first reports on Twitter. We could’ve sent the alert only to people in the neighborhood (East Harlem) or the borough (Manhattan), but we estimated that the large column of smoke and transportation interruptions would impact New York City as a whole.
This is why algorithms have proven problematic in the past. To solve the problem, we’ve combined experienced editorial judgment with technology in real-time. Our lightning-fast platform narrows down the geography, then our editors make judgment calls on the fly to select the appropriate geographic boundary. The impact zone varies with both the story and the unique qualities of the geography around it. It works internationally, too, and it will follow you as you travel.
For example, we sent this proximity alert last week to the Iwate Prefecture in Japan moments after a earthquake there. If you were traveling and felt the shaking, the alert would come as a relief: it was a modest quake in a region with a history of dangerous temblors. We also sent an alert to the country of Thailand when the military announced the nation’s curfew had been lifted. For travelers, proximity alerts are a welcome companion.
The near future
In the battle for your attention, many news sites will do just about anything to get you to click and maximize your “time spent.” For us at Breaking News, this seems backwards. We’d rather maximize your utility by bringing you the important information you need to know right away.
We call it “time saved.” You have better things to do with your time.
Imagine a world where your devices learn what’s important to you, and you “just know” whenever you need to know about breaking news. No hype, no fluff, no begging for you to click or watch. Just the facts you need without the distraction. It’s effortless and instant. It saves you time, keeps you safe and helps you make smarter decisions when it matters most.
That’s our vision of a new world of Breaking News, and we’d love to hear what you think.
(Contact us here, and you can download our new iOS app here.)
