Yahoo News Digest: Well-Summarized Convenient News [Review]

Yahoo News Digest has come to Canada and is delivering summaries of top news stories in the morning and evening. The ease of use and clear summaries make News Digest a great news app.

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A clock lets you know when the next batch of news summaries are coming

There is nothing to setup when you start using Yahoo News Digest, you can start reading the news immediately. You can change the edition between Canada, US, UK and International in the options menu, but New Digest can select the edition for your location.

Every news story also has references that, in most cases, come from news sources in the area of each edition, so you should find them familiar if you’re reading your nation’s edition. Also, when you’re done reading the top stories News Digest gave you, swipe up from the bottom of the main page to see the Extra News summaries that are generally more international.

I really like News Digest. From the clean and eloquent interface to the well summarized and diverse news stories, I believe News Digest is one of the best ways to consume news on iPhone. Although, it’s too bad I can’t control the types of summaries that are sent (Business, Sports, etc), I’ve found the majority of the news summaries interesting (they are top news stories after all).

Also, I like the additional content or “Atoms”, such as tweets and Wikipedia pages, that come with each summary. They give me easy access to more information related to the news summaries, which I appreciate when I find a particularly interesting one.

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The “Atoms” give each summary lots of additional content and the Extra News means there’s always another summary to read

If you recall, Yahoo acquired news app Summly for a reported sum of $30 million back last March. Yahoo News Digest is essentially Summly reborn, which was created by teenager Nick D’Aloisio, who explained why this app was different from the rest to NDTV:

“Most news apps, and I’m generalising here, but they’re infinite streams of information. There’s more than you can ever read coming in and it won’t end, and that means you’ll never feel 100% informed. We’re the anti-thesis of traditional news, we created a finite digest, where you get the definitive stories, and then you’ve completed reading it and you know the news that is important,” D’Aloisio says.

[…]

“When you look at the news apps on a spectrum, we’re really on our own. The others, they’re aggregators, while we prune, we get rid of stories. Also, we don’t personalise the news, we’re definitive,” he says, adding, “People get all the news that they need to read, not just the things they want.” This is accomplished by human editors, something D’Aloisio says AI doesn’t have a solution for – yet.

If you’re looking for a new means to learn about the news of the day, Yahoo News Digest is a great choice. You may not be able to customize the content, but you’ll receive more than enough well summarized news to stay informed. You can download Yahoo News Digest for free from the App Store. Then, tell us what app you’ve been using to keep up with the news.

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