Science and technology are progressing at the speed of light. With discoveries and inventions being made at an exponential rate, the need to stay updated on fresh and intriguing news is indispensable. India's news industry today is booming with a rapidly evolving state of affairs. The country has one of the most vibrant media scenes in the world, and navigating the multifaceted and fast-paced world of news can be an exhilarating experience. However, news pieces are often reported to create bias by shrewd means such as misinterpreting reality and distorting viewpoints. With non-stop 24-hour news cycles, there is a culture of attention-grabbing media that competes commercially with each other as much as they do for breaking news.
In the fast-paced environment we live in, people are attacked by an unlikely source: news they cannot adequately process. In a study headed by anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff, it was observed that people aged from 18 to 34 are bombarded by news and facts to a point where they suffer from “newstritional disorder". Researchers also found that a constant bombardment of facts and updates make it extremely difficult for people to access in-depth stories. This will lead to an imbalance in their news diet, specifically trouble keeping up with complex or in-depth news.
According to a study by Australian educational psychologist, John Sweller, the human mind has limited capacities of learning and retaining new information. When those thresholds are exceeded, there is an increased risk of mental overload, which means that the information will not be processed by our brain, therefore never becoming a part of our long-term memory. Keeping up with the news can feel like another full-time job when there’s so much you need to know about what’s happening around the world, as it’s impossible to read every news report to stay informed. We’re surrounded by so much information that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.
Studies suggest that breaking up vast amounts of content into smaller, clearer chunks increased memory retention by more than 20%. This is where news apps that summarize long-format content step in to save the day by serving up a five-minute entrée to your news diet. News applications containing simplified abstracts are specifically designed to make content more palatable, as they often reduce the news fat, cut back on content, and create scrumptious information nuggets that require fewer mental calories to digest.
In these turbulent times, discovering news sources that are trustworthy and accessible has been more important than ever. These news apps curate and condense news for you by filtering out the noise you don’t need and summarizing complex stories so you can get the important points quickly. They offer the ability to search through a catalogue of topics with quick updates. Most of these apps aggregate and recap important news updates in hopes of tackling several issues with today’s news cycle, such as information overload, burnout, media bias, and algorithms that prioritize engagement over news accuracy.
They also solve the problem of having too much information and not enough time to process it by capturing core facts in a few sentences. Editors select and rewrite every piece of news to put them in a straight-forward manner to help users consume the information instantly. By reading the stories and cutting the fluff, it helps its users to read more in less time. While news websites are scrambling to push the happenings, news applications that provide summaries seek to deliver information more efficiently by helping in the effortless consumption of information with vast coverage across industries and daily events.
Summarized news pieces are usually simplified and crisp, making it an ideal medium to devour information more practically and efficiently. Hence, it is safe to say that news applications containing digestible news summaries are the next step in the evolution of modern journalism.