Reckon you don’t have the time to stop and catch up with your favourite news resources? Don’t worry, help is at hand.
The Tribune Digital, part of the Tribune group which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times newspapers, has launched an app for mobile platforms called ‘Newsbeat’, which reads out the news of the day to the user. And it comes with the possibility of customising preferences.
The app uses text-to-speech technology and recordings of humans reading news articles to produce a daily catalogue of around 7,000 articles about everything from politics to sports. It is quite similar to digital music streaming services such as Pandora Media.
The user can choose what you want to hear by topic, publication or a category that interests the individual. Also, you can listen again to those parts you missed at the first reading, or skip any item deemed uninteresting. According to Aneya Fernando, of the blog ‘10,000 Words’, “Newsbeat is useful for anyone who wants to enjoy the way to work to stay informed — the app can even come up with a list of items based on the estimated time path entered by the user.”
“What most people listen to today on their phones are podcasts — this is not a podcast experience, this is a mainstream news experience,” said Shashi Seth, president of Tribune Digital Ventures, in an interview with ‘VentureBeat’. “We’re bringing the first experience that’s comprehensive, combining human voice and text-to-speech.”
Audio ads
Newsbeat has so far partnered with nearly 600 publications, such as CNN and Fox News and also newspapers that are part of the Tribune group. The good news is that the app is free. It is funded by money from audio ads that are inserted between news segments.
Guess nothing is ever really free — there will be two ads running every 10 minutes.
