Flipboard 4.0 focuses on “Smart Magazines” with heavily customized content. Source: Flipboard
Flipboard on Wednesday announced a major update to its news-aggregating app that targets fake news and emphasizes different views from across the political spectrum — ongoing hot-button topics following last year’s US presidential election.
The app update, available for iOS, Android and the web, sports a new, minimalistic layout throughout that now focuses on content that’s heavily personalized for each user by way of what the startup calls “Smart Magazines.” Each Smart Magazine is essentially a digital collection of up-to-date stories pulled from different news sources in a larger theme of your choosing, like sports, politics or celebrity news. It’s also possible to fine tune Smart Magazines’ content to pick and choose from thousands of topics, like say, a technology-themed Smart Magazine that focused on venture capital-backed startups.
But perhaps Flipboard’s two most interesting features have to do with how your news can be curated — two features which were somewhat downplayed when Flipboard previewed the update for Yahoo Finance.
Many Americans complained they were blindsided by November’s presidential election results thanks in part to sources like Facebook (FB), which favored presenting content to users from like-minded friends. Hillary Clinton supporters, for example, were likely to see pro-Hillary Clinton stories in their News Feeds, while Donald Trump supporters likely saw more pro-Trump articles pop up. Meanwhile, fake news — at least fake news in the sense of factually-inaccurate stories — continues to be a concern for many readers now unsure of which stories are true and which outlets are trustworthy.
In the latest update, Flipboard tries tackling both problems with a group of human editors on staff who pick and choose some of the content users will see in their Smart Magazines, along with a “Left, Center, Right” option which Flipboard CEO Mike McCue explained presents different political views from across the spectrum.
Will Flipboard recommend news from so-called “alt-right platform” Breitbart News? No. But chances are much, much higher moving forward you’ll stumble upon stories now with opinions and angles different from yours.
This latest Flipboard update arrives seven years since Mike McCue launched Flipboard for the iPad as a way for people to consume news across the web in a crisp, magazine-like layout. The company has raised well over $200 million from backers including Jack Dorsey, Ron Conway, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.