US-based news aggregator Smartnews has launched a second app aimed at providing an “antidote” to content which capitalises on “outrage”.
The company says its Newsarc app uses agentic AI to surface stories in different ways to the other platforms.
Newsarc is designed to prioritise breadth and substance rather than focus on breaking news headlines.
Jason Holtman, senior vice president of product at Smartnews, told Press Gazette: “We basically built it to be the antidote for the news platforms that are out there now that rely on outrage and polarisation and attention reinforcement.
“It’s just not built that way… instead of looking for signals of what will make you click, or what will make you angry, it’s looking for signals of what’s right, what’s interesting, what’s long, what’s surprising.”
The launch comes in an ecosystem that has seen news aggregators squeezed and sending less page views to publishers in recent years.
[Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down]
Google News sent 225.8 million page views to the publisher sample in July, down 28% compared to July 2023 and 18% in the past year.
Smartnews was the third-biggest aggregator in the sample, narrowly behind Newsbreak (down 14% in two years or 29% compared to last year to 43.6 million). Smartnews sent 41.3 million page views in July, down 27% in two years or 44% compared to last July.
Despite its huge popularity, Apple News appears to be one of the lowest for referrals (two million in July) likely because readers usually consume the full article within its app, limiting outbound clicks. Many other aggregator apps technically open a news website’s page even if it still appears to be within their own environment.
Asked for possible reasons why there has been a decline across the board, Chartbeat’s senior data scientist Cynthia Vu said: “Over the past five years, news aggregators have been squeezed from every direction.
“Big platforms have dialled down referral traffic, search engines now serve headlines without the click, and readers are increasingly staying inside walled gardens like social apps, personalised feeds, and Google Discover, which functions like an aggregator but keeps users inside its own ecosystem.
“At the same time, niche newsletters, podcasts and paywalled publishers have pulled audiences into their own worlds, leaving aggregators with fewer unique hooks to stand out.
“The result is a perfect storm where the audience’s path to the news is shorter, but the journey rarely leads through a traditional aggregator anymore.”
Why Smartnews is launching second app, NewsArc
Smartnews says it reaches millions of people in countries including the US but not in the UK (although British publishers feature prominently) and works with more than 3,000 publishers.
Holtman told Press Gazette the addition of Newsarc is a bit like Meta owning both Facebook and Instagram. “Smartnews is very good about paying attention to you. So in Smartnews, if you want to see something, it’ll do a really good job of feeding this and we have customers that love that….
“We don’t base that on attention or outrage or things like that, but it is a more dialled-in, personal experience, whereas news arc is not. Newsarc is going against some of those things and being a longer read, a more engaged read.”
Holtman said the launch of the separate Newsarc app feels like it is timed well to “match a moment” as publishers look towards this “more thoughtful” content in the face of Google’s AI summaries and the changing face of search.
He said it could also help counter news avoidance, with 42% of people in the US actively trying to avoid the news sometimes or often according to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report. (News avoiders are however much lower in Japan, the home market of Smartnews, where just 11% said they do so.)
Holtman said: “There’s a real problem with news avoidance. People talk about that as, like, I just want to click quickly, or I want a summary, or I don’t like the news. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.
“I think humans and groups of people and friends, they really like the news, they want to like the news, they just don’t like how it’s presented right now…”
He added that when articles are “presented correctly… people love spending time – ten, 15 minutes, an hour or so – reading what they want to read.”
Newsarc includes a personalised choice of stories based on the topics people like, but also presents 12 top stories deemed the most important to provide a “shared news experience… we think that’s a big, important part of the news.”
It also includes the ability to mute certain stories or events for a few days. Holtman explained that instead of blocking a story or removing a publisher, the button means people can “take a break from this”.
For example he cited a story like the trial of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs which was important but which people might not want to see every day throughout.
Although Newsarc promises “thoughtful, longer-form reading”, that does not necessarily mean only long articles. Holtman said often it needs to be clearer before people click on an article what they’re going to get: whether it’s short or long, and whether it is news or opinion.
“Sometimes the exact story you want to be in your number three position is three paragraphs long, but it’s the right three paragraphs from the right place,” he said. “Other times, it’s a very long exegesis on some topic.”
The Arc platform, for which Smartnews has not built or trained its own AI, in part uses large language models and new proprietary tech to “look for a different set of signals that doesn’t have to do with what you just clicked… we’ve got it chained up, doing very interesting things very, very quickly that get a new emerging signal that can sometimes be very surprising,” Holtman said.
Human editors help to review the output and fine-tune the process, he added.
He also said it is better at not showing multiple stories on the same subject from multiple news publishers.
Ultimately the tech and the learnings from Newsarc is intended to be shared with the main Smartnews app, Holtman confirmed.
Goal to ‘grow with publishers, not at their expense’
Smartnews works with publishers on a revenue-share basis, paying them according to their page views in the app which shows users advertising.
The Newsarc app does not have advertising but Holtman said publishers are nonetheless being paid “on their page views as if there were advertising there”.
Holtman emphasised the importance of the publisher partners: “Publishers should be treated fairly, and that our goal is to grow with our publishers, not at their expense… This isn’t just about a short term gain. It’s a long term play. And we need this information. We need these journalists, we need these publishers. We all need it. So we want to build this together and find the value together.”
Reach’s US managing director Michael Cascio, leading the Mirror, Express and Irish Star across the Atlantic, told Press Gazette last month they had found success on aggregators like Smartnews, helping them get exposure in a new market, bring in revenue and bring traffic back to the sites.
Newsarc is ultimately expected to become a paid-for subscription product, and/or with larger sponsorship “where the advertising is outside of what you’re reading, so that you can actually get that experience that you’re expecting to be immersed in”.
On other aggregators, Holtman said, advertising often interrupts the reading experience and this is what they wanted to avoid on Newsarc as a point of differentiation.
“The advertisements you’re used to in an aggregator is not there, and the reason it’s not there is it disrupts the reading experience.
“We worked on this a lot because we are very good at advertising. Smartnews deeply understands how to advertise inside of an aggregation engine. But what happened is, if you were trying to sit and read or look at a picture or find the flow, it broke all those things down, and then the underlying core value of it decreased.”
Newsarc launched last week but Holtman said so far engagement metrics are looking “very positive, because what we’re finding right now is people are doing what we expected them to do. They are reading and spending lots of time.”
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