3 Free news apps for students
If you’re a college student looking to get informed, you’re in luck — thousands of news apps have updated their design and streamlined their content, all so you young techies can slip in a few engaging articles during the 15 minutes before your next class. But as a college student, you probably don’t want to spend any money on subscription fees or app purchases.
Here are three of the best free news apps for students.
SmartNews:
Rating: 8.5/10
Compatible for iPhone and Android.
You might spend ten minutes on a big-name news site to find an article that seems relevant to you and/or important. Some sites are getting better about this, organizing their home page to show you breaking news toward the top and feature-y articles toward the bottom or side. But in general, you still have to sort through a lot of text. That process is streamlined by SmartNews, an app that sorts through all the top news sites to provide the top, trending stories.
The interface allows you to skim headlines quickly, and there are dozens of channels for you to customize your news — from sports, to business, to world news, to entertainment.
The major disadvantage to SmartNews is you only see what’s trending. You miss out on the quirky articles you’d find buried in the far corners of a news site.
Digg:
Rating: 6.5/10
Compatible for iPhone and Android.
Unlike many news apps, Digg doesn’t throw a bunch of headlines and text at you. Consequently, it’s not as effective at informing students as thoroughly as possible in a small amount of time — grazing through headlines on the crowded New York Times site, while draining, can be informative. The interface only allows about one story to take up screen space at once, and the top story has a short explanation of the article.
Unlike apps from publications, the stories on Digg are chosen by a community, not editors. Most of the material is topics light news readers would be interested in — none of the “dry” stuff. Even if you’re interested in the dry stuff, (politics, data, law) there are channels for that. It just takes a few taps to find it.
Paper
Rating: 8/10
Compatible for iPhone.
Paper is a customizable news app from Facebook. It includes stories from your Facebook feed — stories from your friends — which you can quickly scroll through in the sleek and sophisticated interface. The top half of the screen slides through the main stories, which have eye-catching photos. The bottom half shows a few stories in a vertical fashion, which you can slide through.
There are 11 sections to choose from — there’s “score,” a sports section;“flavor,” which features food-related news; and even an LOL section. It also has features you can add, including “read later” and autoplay for videos.
If you’re like me and your Facebook feed has basically become a news feed, Paper is the app you’re looking for.
— Brenna Kelly is a sophomore majoring in journalism, with minors in multimedia and political science. She mostly writes articles, but occasionally tweets. Contact her with suggestions at brennakelly818@gmail.com and @bckelly8.