The Best News Apps of 2023
Getting news these days is like trying to take a sip from a fire hose—it's just too much! Social media, news sites, and TV flood us with so much info that it's hard to find one reliable place for news without going crazy. I usually check my favorite news websites and apps, listen to podcasts, and yes, even scroll through Twitter. But let's be real, there has to be a better way to stay informed without spending hours and losing my mind. So, I decided to give a news aggregator app a shot.
Am I the only one who is sick of seeing BBC News put the granny next door finding a Lewis Hamilton shaped rock on their top 10 for the day?! These are my top picks for folks like me who want to get the important news without drowning in all the noise.
The Best Apps
- PANORA for free access to all the news on the internet summarised in a simple way with options to customise your feed and a beautiful dashboard with information on your reading habits
- Google News incredibly localised news
- Flipboard for a more magazine-like experience
- Ground News if you're more focused on politics
As we tested these apps, here is what we looked out for:
- Personalisation and customaisation: The news needed to be presented well and organized intuitively on a custom feed. Everyone reads the news differently, so there needed to be features available for personalization, including the ability to follow certain topics, save searches, or create folders.
- Content interaction: I wanted to see what options were available for engaging with the content (e.g., a comment section or share options).
- Categories: Each app organizes its content differently, but I wanted to see some sort of category-based organization, whether that was tabs, side panels, grouped content, or anything else.
- Search and Filter: Sometimes you're looking for a specific news topic, so I made sure search and filter capabilities allowed you to do that.
PANORA News Pros
- Ability to customise feed based on your topics and locations of interest
- A wide range of articles about any event is consolidated together for easy reading
- AI generated summaries of all the articles for a quick overview
- Articles are intelligently tagged with a colour to show bias
- Dashboard shows you data on your reading habits including your streak, bias and depth of knowledge by topic
- Ability to comment on posts, bookmark for future reading, follow friends creating an overall nicer social experience
- News is powered by the information from your search history
PANORA News Cons
- No access to paid subscriptions
Google News Pros
- Emphasis on local news
- "Full coverage" link shows you a wide array of articles on that topic
- News is powered by the information from your search history
Google News Cons
- No in app reading - links take you directly to article page
- Seems to miss the important news
Google News Pros
- Ability to currate your own magazines and share them with others
- Nice user interface and user experience
Google News Cons
- Have to pay for access to some of the individual news sources
Ground News Pros
- Each story is tagges with a Bias Distribution along a political spectrum
- Twitter Blindspotter tool analyzes your news diet on social media
- Filter view lets you sort by bias, factuality, paywall or location
Ground News Cons
