The Redmond, Washington company, Microsoft is launching new apps and a range of new desktop news experiences, called Microsoft News, on MSN, the Edge browser and other Microsoft properties.
With this new experience, it is a mix of publisher partnerships, algorithms and human editorial curation. These experiences not only seem to be well-designed apps that appear on both iOS and Android, but also offers a high degree of customization.
Microsoft, who may be concious of the double-edged impact of such apps, repeatedly underscores, the importance of quality journalism and includes numerous quotes about what a great partner it is to publishers. Here’s a portion of the post that announced News:
We believe that a free, well-funded press is a critical part of our social fabric and are proud to partner with the world’s best news brands, offering a business model that gives people access, at no-cost, to trustworthy news and provides a sustainable source of revenue for publishers. In just the past four years we’ve delivered more than $600 million back to our publishers, enabling them to focus on what they do best: quality journalism.
The company says, “There are more than 800 editors working from 50 locations around the world — including editorial newsrooms serving multiple regions in India, Germany, France, Mexico, Canada and Spain.”
Similar to Google’s “full coverage” approach in its recently redesigned News app, Microsoft says that it wants to provide both depth and breadth in the news coverage it offers:
Diversity, in our newsroom and in the publishers we partner with, is a key ingredient of the Microsoft News experience. We carefully compose our pages every day to present multiple sides of a story and consciously curate a wide variety of opinion pieces so that our readers can explore issues via new and different perspectives.