New iPad app offers "world's first fully personalised newspaper"

A new news app for the iPad, Apollo, aims to offer "the world's first fully personalized newspaper," according to a report on the World Editors' Forum blog.

The app is loosely based on the music platform Pandora, which suggests to users new music that it thinks they will like, based on their preferences. The Editors blog reports that after its release on Friday by Hawthorne Labs, Apollo quickly jumped to number 11 in the Apple iPad store, according to co-founder Evan Reas. It is priced at $4.99 (or €3.99).

Quoted by TechCrunch and others as saying that the app aimed to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," Reas stressed to the EW that he did not in fact intend to destroy news providers, but simply that he believed that print newspapers were becoming less relevant to younger people, and that digital news was the future.

"What I was trying to express is that the traditional newspaper (and system that surrounds print news) is dying," he wrote on his blog.

Reas has stressed that he did not want Apollo to be seen as a threat to the news industry. "We believe that we are a friend to traditional news sources, helping them get new views from a new medium," he said, adding that "we think it is mutually beneficial for us and the content sources."

Apollo aims to help readers discover new content that they will like, based both on their expressed preferences - they can like or dislike specific articles, and favourite sources - and on which articles they read, how much time they spend on each, and what 'similar' users like.

The news is separated into different category groups, which are displayed as boxes along the bottom. Each of these has a choice of several different subcategories, which were chosen following extensive user testing, Reas said.

The categories are intended to prompt users to read different types of news, and maybe to discourage them from only reading about the topics with which they are already familiar.

The Editors Weblog write how, one of the arguments against personalized news is that it takes away the element of serendipity, the chance to discover something totally new, but Reas said that the categories and the fact that Apollo is continuously bringing in new sources and articles will retain an element of this.

Apollo selects news from thousands of sources, both established news sources and blogs, using their public RSS feeds to link to content within the app. No content is licensed, and as the RSS feeds are public this should not be a problem.