'Inside' News App Prioritizes People Over Algorithms

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Image: Mashable, Will Fenstermaker

By Karissa Bell2014-01-29 04:27:24 UTC

Inside, the latest venture from entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, is trying to change people's perception of how news apps should work. The app, which launched Tuesday, takes a different approach to content curation — one that emphasizes humans over algorithms.

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At the heart of the app is a team of human curators who are constantly pulling in stories culled from what they consider the best and most reliable sources. The stories are aggregated into the app where they are then organized by topic.

Users select the topics that interest them to create a personalized feed of stories based on their interests. But unlike other news apps, the feed doesn't simply display the stories. Each headline appears with a 300-character "update" specially written by one of Inside's curators. The updates are brief, fact-driven summaries of the stories.

Inside's curators write brief fact-driven summaries of each news story that appears in the app.

After seeing the updates, users can then click through to read the full story, or move on to the next item in their feed. The curators are constantly pulling in sources, and publishing new updates every one to three minutes, according to Inside.

Calacanis, Inside's CEO, believes that by emphasizing facts, the company can quickly connect readers to the most-relevant, high-quality information.

"There’s a ton of great journalism out there,” Calacanis said in a release. “The problem is that it gets lost with all the rebloggers and aggregation sites that craft sensationalized and often times false headlines to trick the reader into clicking."

Calacanis tapped Gabriel Snyder, who previously ran Gawker, The Atlantic Wire and Newsweek Digital, to head up content for Inside. The company also has an impressive list of backers, including Elon Musk, News Corp., CBS and Mark Cuban.

The app is available for iOS and Blackberry. For now, Android users are limited to the mobile-web version of the app, but Inside says an Android app is scheduled for release later this year.

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Topics: apps-and-software, Apps and Software, iOS, news apps, Tech