Unveiled earlier in the week, Particle News is a venture by former Twitter engineers last year, led by former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, to introduce a novel way to consume news through AI-powered summarisation.
According to the startup’s claims, Particle News offers a personalised, ‘multi-perspective’ news reading experience that leverages AI to summarise the news and aims to do so in a way that fairly compensates authors and publishers.
While the claims are always promising and rewarding, Particle News has yet to unveil its business model and has been in private beta since last week. Moreover, it is a bold claim, especially considering the increasing concerns regarding AI’s potential to diminish traditional news publishers’ revenues by reducing direct traffic to their sites, meaning their ability to monetise via advertising would also be reduced.
Particle News Premise and Objective
As mentioned above, Sara Beykpour founded Particle News last year with her co-founder, Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, with the premise of addressing the challenge of staying informed in today’s fast-paced world with AI’s help and making it easier to keep up with news using AI.
In her introduction regarding the platform on Threads, Beykpour wrote: “Sometimes it feels like headlines are all we have time for. We also want to understand more, but faster. We’re in the early stages of using AI to transform the way we interact with news. By using Particle News, readers are offered a quick, bulleted summary of the story, with information pulled from different sources to get up to speed or choose to go deeper to learn about how a story has unfolded over time.”
Her idealogy evidently received support as the venture-backed startup has raised a total of $4.4 million in seed funding from notable investors like Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures and endorsements from industry figures such as Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
Belsky even went on to Twitter to write: “Particle News has become a daily app for me. It synthesises the many articles and angles on any news topic, surfaces the key points as objectively as possible, and lets you dig further across many dimensions. In the era of abstraction ahead, great examples of daily AI.”
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How Does Particle News Work?
Therefore, how does Particle News actually work? Concerning this, the company gave a detailed explanation on their LinkedIn page, but we will highlight the pivotal details from its long statement below:
- Particle News utilises its patent-protected Interest Engine to crawl, analyse and index hundreds of millions of news articles from The New York Times, CNBC, the AP, ABC, CNN, Breitbart, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, blogs, forums, social media sites and more to recommend a unique and personalised content consumption experience per user.
- Following that, the platform uses its enriched user interest profile as queries to learn from user behaviour data.
- Lastly, Particle News will deliver personalised news articles, recommendation engines, or social connections for social networks according to its PC, web and mobile users.
The company ends their explanation with the saying: “Particle News Reader makes news reading a rewarding experience rather than time-killing. The more one interacts with our product, the better Particle News Reader understands him, and thus, the more personally relevant content the platform relates to the user’s interest. “
AI’s Negative Impact on News Platforms and Journalists
With the emergence of another AI news startup, it once more showcases the grim state of the news business. For example, according to the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, in January alone, the news industry, including print, broadcast and digital media, saw 538 announced layoffs after the massive 3,087 layoffs in 2023.
One such company that contributed the most to the numbers in Artifact, the buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, shut down after indications showed that the platform could not catch up to the competition and struggled to grow. As employees lost their jobs, many turned to social media to vent their frustrations and concerns towards their professions’ future.
Tim Franklin, a senior associate dean at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school, expressed the scene as “breathtaking”. He explained: This is a continuation of the trend of what’s happening throughout last year. Also, layoffs tend to occur either at the end of the year or the beginning of the year just because many news companies are trying to lay a foundation for the upcoming year. Part of the issue is that the landscape is changing so rapidly that the news organisations are trying to change the wheels on the plane as it’s flying, which is also a challenge.”
Thus, will Particle News succeed where many of its predecessors failed? Comment your thoughts on https://twitter.com/playerdotme and bookmark the page for daily updates regarding the trending news on the web.