The rise of the throwaway news app

"In the mid-2000s, when newspapers were still quite large and fully panicking about what to do about the digital product, a movement formed around what ended up being called news apps. Now, young reader, today we think of "apps" meaning "phone" but this is the pre-iPhone days. What news apps developers made in the mid to late 2000s were websites. But not just websites - they were big, data-driven, searchable, clickable things. You explored them."

"It took a blending of skills that didn't exist in newsrooms natively - programming and design and engineering and scaling. It also rode the wave of an innovation of the moment: cloud servers. Don't have a server to put this on? Rent one! Easy! Pirate bands of innovators tried to change what a unit of journalism was. Journalists learned to code. Coders came into journalism. Cool things were built. Prizes were won."

"But as the business model under it all slowly collapsed, all but the biggest places realized that running these apps was expensive. And the more you deployed, the more you had to maintain. With once great newspapers struggling to keep the lights on, and new non-profit entities just trying to figure out if they were going to make it, fancy web apps on scalable infrastructure became a luxury most couldn't afford. The news app was dead."

"In 2026, thanks to AI, long live the news app. Today, a whole lot of people are trying to figure out where AI fits into news creation. Some places are using it to create more Stuff to put on the Thing - in spite of the audience not asking for it. Some are using it to help with story discovery."

In the mid-2000s, newsrooms developed data-driven "news apps" — large, searchable, interactive websites enabled by cloud servers. These projects blended programming, design, engineering, and journalistic skills, producing innovations and new units of journalism such as PolitiFact. Rising infrastructure and maintenance costs, combined with collapsing business models, made these apps unsustainable for most organizations, and many projects shut down. In 2026, generative AI creates opportunities to resurrect cost-effective, scalable news apps. Organizations are experimenting with AI for content generation, story discovery, and other newsroom tasks, suggesting potential new forms of journalism if ethical and economic challenges are addressed.

Read at Nieman Lab