On December 8th, NBC announced they will be shutting down its Breaking News app.
“We are committed to a culture of experimentation and innovation at NBC News Digital and Breaking News was a product that embodied that spirit for more than five years,” Nick Ascheim, NBC’s News SVP of digital said. “However, experiments eventually need to sustain themselves and in this case, despite every effort, we just weren’t able to get there.”
A couple of other news apps have been terminated recently, including The New York Times’ NYT Now and The Times of London’s weekly international app. The amount of time mobile users spend reading the news on news outlet apps is decreasing, as users are spending more time on social media apps.
Push notifications are becoming more important than ever for news apps. Studies show that 72% of users who get news alerts say they “value the notifications they receive and many see alerts as a critical part of the news app proposition.”
Isn’t it ironic that fake news is on the rise, while news apps are on the decline?
I have to agree that push notifications are extremely important. I don’t remember the last time I opened a news app, as I always end up reading the story on Facebook or Twitter. It would be a different story if I was receiving push notifications from the news app, because it would constantly grab my attention whenever an important story is released.
Push notifications are great, but I always wonder what the saturation point is. There has to be a point where a newsroom can send too many alerts and the user decides to just shut it off. I also see some newsrooms using push alerts to promote stories. This isn’t what the audience is expecting if you’re calling it a “breaking news” alert.
With all the fake news rise and ease of access regarding mobile apps, this does not surprise me at all. The push notification can’t be reliably used for breaking news, unless one is glued to their smart devices, I mean it’s hard to calling something that happens 8 hours ago “breaking”. It is a sad, but a real cost cutting measure, that we could see more of in the near future.
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