In the final post concluding this semester’s News Track blog, I will review the app of Boston Globe.
Instead of the website, I usually get my news through app push notifications or daily subscribed email briefings.
Boston Globe will email you summarized new stories and headlines as early as 5 AM in the morning. The emails usually consist of big pictures, with a few lines under the picture and a link that will take you to the full story on Boston Globe’s website. The title of that email will be the biggest story’s headline or a combination of several stories together. Ads would be inserted in between news clips.
In the app, there is more sections to navigate than on the website. Since each section can be expanded to several sub-categories, readers can actually navigate more precisely on the app.
There is a function in the app that I think can be useful but needs to be improved — the news alerts.
Currently, in the Boston Globe App, the only thing things that can be set to receive alerts are Breaking News, Sports and Politics. As I understand that is probably statistically what calls for most attention and the alert function can be used for, but it would be nice to see they add customization to this function. For example, it would be nice to see a “key word trigger” setting — the user can set a series of keywords which will trigger an alert when that keyword appears in the headline/author(by line)/captions/stories…etc.
