BuzzFeed is one of those news sites that you either love or hate, but they do have some quality journalists on staff and they do, frequently, have some breaking news before it ends up anywhere else. I’m not sure that I’ve ever been a fan of news stories that are made up entirely of memes or screenshots of tweets, but this is the era we’re living in … and as I say, there are often some good news stories there to be found.
Anyway, BuzzFeed is itself in the news at the moment – kind of – having released the Android version of their News app. This isn’t exactly ‘new’ news, it was launched a few days ago, and we missed it at the time due to other things happening around that time (Nexus stuff), but even in a few short days, the app has been downloaded over 350k times, and users are seemingly getting quite a bit of enjoyment from the app, spending four to five minutes browsing through the news each time they open the app. Push Notifications are built in, and very popular, according to a BuzzFeed spokesperson.
For those who’ve not tried it yet, here’s the pitch:
- The app supports a range of storytelling approaches — free-form text, bulleted and numbered lists, expandable timelines, images, photo galleries, charts, maps and quotes. Easy to skim and no need to leave the app to find our great news content.
- Push notifications: Our audience can choose what topics they’d like to be alerted to, and our ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature allows users to dictate when they receive alerts. Notifications are easy to share.
- Quickly catch up: A handy, easy-to-read, and shareable guide to the biggest and most important news stories of the day, updated frequently and as news breaks.
- Social embeds: The app supports embedding newsworthy tweets, Vines, and Facebook posts and GIFs.
- Emojis: good way to orient the reader and convey information quickly because on mobile you can’t assume anyone will stay with you or click through, emoji doesn’t have to mean flippant and we’re using them as a storytelling method, ex: used blue and red dots to show who’s declared to run for president.
If you enjoy reading BuzzFeed, or even if you don’t know yet, you can install the app today and try it out.
