Quartz Brief and Winno are two deprecated news apps that sought to limit their users' intake of news, albeit in different ways.
I don't like to waste my time. One of the easiest ways to waste time in the Information Age is news. It seems like practically every news outlet has a quota to meet, resulting in a plethora of news stores getting unnecessarily published. I attempted to escape this onslaught of journalistic noise by tuning it out entirely, but didn't like being ignorant about what was happening in the world. Consequently, I turned to news aggregation apps.
Most news aggregation apps fail to separate the signal from the noise, but as you've probably guessed by now, I found a couple that managed to pull off this feat: Quartz Brief and Winno.
Quartz Brief was a news aggregation app that aggregated most of its news from its own news team. While I prefer to get my news from a variety of sources, I was willing to accept this approach because of the way the news was presented. Unlike typical news aggregation apps, including Quartz's own self-titled news app, Quartz Brief was not designed to serve users a buffet of news, but rather a multi-course meal. More specifically, the app's UI was that of your typical chat app, a la Facebook Messenger or iMessage. Users were presented with a couple of messages they could send the app's chat bot, like the speech options presented in many JRPG games. Quartz Brief's chat bot would then respond in kind with a speech bubble containing a news brief based on the user's selected chat option. This approach to news presentation allowed news to be digested in small portions, as opposed to bottomless platters. As a result, I left my sessions with this app feeling satisfied sans the nausea induced by the buffet-style presentation of most news aggregation apps (think Apple News or Flipboard).
Winno was an app whose selling point was that the news stories it presented were human-aggregated. Due to the limitations of human labor, this aggregation approach led to a reduced quantity of news presented on the app. Just like with Quartz Brief, Winno found a "bottom" to the news, thus leaving me with more time at my disposal.
While I'm certainly disappointed that these apps are no longer apart of my life, I'm not particularly surprised. The news market is one where attention is capital, so apps that exist primarily to avoid capitalizing on their users' attention are almost bound to struggle to attract and retain users more so than their attention-hungry counterparts. I just wish that the app ecosystem could sustain apps with small but passionate user bases.
Original Date: October 14, 2022