Wagner James Au / New World Notes

NewsArc is a free new iOS/Android app from SmartNews, a startup where Cory Ondrejka, Second Life's co-founder/ founding CTO, has been CTO for the last couple years.

As he explains on his blog, the app is a kind of culmination of his career over the last twenty-something years, including at Linden Lab and Meta, and the societal trends (both good and ill) impelled by tech he's been involved with along the way:

The theme of my career is building new things when technology changes. A Magic the Gathering arcade game as the first 3D accelerators appeared. Road Rash as consoles replaced arcade. Second Life as broadband and graphics cards made a streaming virtual world possible. Mobile transition at Facebook as smartphones transformed how we connect to each other and information. New interface, privacy controls, and strategy work at Google as AI started to change everything.

Throughout the last twenty years, other transformations have been building -– ones my work creating the modern mobile feed at Meta likely contributed to –- the loss of trust in media and the collapse of news experiences into filter bubbles, misinformation, polarization, and doom scrolling. Misaligned incentives around news, attention, traffic, and advertising is a much larger – and older – phenomenon than Big Tech, of course, but I’ve always hoped technology should be able to do more to address misalignment.

So NewsArc is a response to all that, driven by a mission of building a healthier news ecosystem that can better sustain democracy. (Lord knows that's needed now.)

As Cory tells me, the app integrates large language model-driven AI agents to better surface quality news content in a seamless mobile experience:

"LLM agents allow us, for the first time, to build an understanding of what's happening around the world, in real time, from global news stories. This allows NewsArc to deliver high-quality news that respects readers' time and attention while resisting capture by outrage and polarization. Coming from games and virtual worlds, the realization that our deep understanding applies to better discovery for all news — not just hard news — meant we could totally reimagine the interface."

The app includes a Community response section, and some design features that are meant to mitigate against doom scrolling and superficially viral news bites: 

"We took inspiration from news readers, people looking for those great moments to really dig into the whole story. We start with the Front Page — the top news that matters with interests you selected mixed in but with a start and an end, not an infinite feed. From there, readers can find incredible breadth and depth by creating their own personal magazine blend in Collections. Or be surprised and delighted by the daily Variety."

Check it out here. I just downloaded it myself and am pretty impressed by its sleek and agile user experience — no surprise there, as Cory led development of Facebook's mobile app back in the day. (Which as I write in the book, then indirectly led to Cory leading Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR.) I'm curious how (or if) the app can better sustain journalism as a profession, especially since LLMs depend on high quality, well-researched content. But that's a topic for another time!