Social news app News360 partners with 30 news outlets

Social newsreader app News360 has announced the launch of the first stage of a publisher programme.

The US-based app has teamed up with 30 publishers, including large outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic and GigaOM, plus smaller, niche sites.

The publisher programme is now in beta and is focussing on providing news outlets – particularly niche publishers – with a "platform through which to engage with readers that are specifically inside their target audience, increasing reach, engagement and traffic".

"This announcement is about bringing traffic to our partners, it's about making sure that the experience around their content in News360 is what they expect it to be, that it is branded," Roman Karachinsky, chief executive of News360 told Journalism.co.uk.

"The value that we are giving publishers is this connection between a user who hasn't seen the source before or who doesn't know about this author, to suddenly knowing about them."

App users get the "content they love from their favourite publishers, all in one place".

No money has changed hands between News360 and the publishers at this stage; the next step will see publishers offered monetisation opportunities, Karachinsky told Journalism.co.uk. "We plan to launch a fresh take on the traditional publisher revenue model in early 2013."

News360 recently relaunched its app, rethinking the design and introducing new features including a personalised 'local news' section, pushing geolocated news to the user.

The app, which relaunched on Android last week and is available for iPad, iPhone and web, uses a personalisation algorithm to deliver news based on the user's topic selections and social networks.

The algorithm also learns what style and length of article the user favours, delivering more of the same.

"Since rolling out the 'new' News360 to iPad users in July, we've seen eye-opening user engagement on the part of our readers and are now serving up 10 million stories per month, so we know we're onto something," Karachinsky said in a press release.

He told Journalism.co.uk: "We want the publisher programme to be available to a very wide range of publications. We think the most value will go to the content creators that have niche content or local content that have trouble marketing and including audiences.

"Everybody knows about the New York Times and there's no discovery value there. For something like Journalism.co.uk I think there is discovery value there because there are tonnes of people who are interesting in journalism who might not be familiar with the site."

Click here to learn more about partnering with News360.

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