
NBC will shut down the Breaking News app - vit05
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/12/when-10-million-followers-isnt-enough-nbc-news-will-shut-down-the-breaking-news-app-on-dec-31/
======
ohstopitu
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?)

~~~
angry-hacker
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.

~~~
ohstopitu
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.

------
ryandrake
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...)

------
stevefeinstein
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.

------
NasEscobar
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.

------
james_pm
Closest thing I've found is
[https://twitter.com/BNONews](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.

------
alistproducer2
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.

~~~
ghettoCoder
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.

~~~
thinnerlizzy
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.

------
vrdabomb5717
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.

~~~
petre
Or just use the DuckDuckGo app.

~~~
Pigo
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.

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

~~~
Pigo
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.

------
bb101
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.

------
john_mac
[https://virwire.com](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.

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

~~~
brandables
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.

~~~
ceejayoz
> 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](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey)

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

~~~
ceejayoz
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](https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/a-matter-of-time).

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

