Instead of making New Year’s resolutions this year (which I inevitably fail at keeping), I decided to go with themes for the year instead. One of the themes is learning more about the world around me. With that in mind, I subscribed to and downloaded Espresso (from The Economist) and WSJ (from The Wall Street Journal). I like them both, but this post is about the news app from Quartz that came in a bit later. I absolutely love it. It’s only available on iOS for now, so everyone else is out of luck.
There are multiple reasons why I’m a big fan. To narrow it down: it’s fun, quick, and free.
To expand on that: It’s the news in a format that is very conversational. Imagine if you asked a friend to tell you about the top news items of the day. That’s what Quartz does, in a very entertaining way to boot. Complex issues are whittled down to bite-sized texts. From a product perspective, the UI looks exactly like the Messages app on my iPhone. You even see the “…” before the next text shows up, so they’ve really recreated the messaging experience.
I’m a reader so I’m not particularly averse to long articles, but most of my friends have never read a newspaper from end-to-end. Even for the younger Snapchat-loving, Emoji-abusing millennials, this app is comforting in its familiarity. It’s a far cry from news in its ugly, boring format. I liken it to Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s not a literary masterpiece, but I’m okay with its existence since at the end of the day, the book is getting more people to read.
I also don’t have to pick the type of news I read, because that decision is made for me (otherwise I end up totally skipping the politics and sports sections). The news items I see are the ones that Quartz has already curated, which is good enough for me. There is an element of control though, so you can choose whether you want to see more information about a specific news event. You decide where and how far the story goes.
I’m also glad they didn’t over-engineer it. You can’t actually type a response since you can only choose from preset options like “Cool” or “Not interested”. No artificial intelligence type sorcery here. Added bonus, they have nifty little quizzes for when you’re all caught up with the news and market haikus like this one that are hilarious (to be fair, they send this in their email newsletter too).
Pity the bankers
Low rates. New rules. Now, oil bust!
Still—the hair looks great
Image credit: http://fusion.net/