Product Hunt Daily - Newsletters vs Apps

Yes, newsletters are hot right now, but does Gen Z care?

Research from Reuters Institute shows that only 3% of people under 35 prefer email as their primary gateway to consuming the news, compared to the 34% who prefer social media.

“Most publishers are drifting towards newsletters to appeal to our attention deficit. But we're going backward by having to wait until the next day to get 5 articles when we have memes on current news within an hour,” maker Shannon Almeida wrote on Product Hunt.

Volv is a real-time app for consuming the news in 9-second reads (with links to the full piece when you want them). Those bite-sized reads are written to be digestible and non-biased.

Today, Almeida and team launched the app’s second iteration. Since the first launch, Volv has expanded its coverage on topics like crypto and hype trends and added features like timeline view and upvoting. Its biggest update is its writer platform. Recognizing that writers aren’t usually video-first creators, Volv is now hoping to attract new writers who want to increase their discoverability without “having to resort to dancing on TikTok to share their insights.”

The move follows another startup in the bite-sized news business, Listle, which opened its platform to creators last year. YC-backed Listle first launched with short audio news clips before pivoting to video.

Listle and Volv recognize that younger generations are increasingly concerned about misinformation. Articles and podcasts about going “down the rabbit hole” regularly raise red flags about big tech algorithms (in fact, Facebook whistleblower and former product manager, Frances Haugen, just testified before the Senate on the subject yesterday). Early adopters in our community like both new apps for their efforts to combat biases — Listle only uses trusted new sources, and Volv uses AI to flag biased words, opinions, and check for a left or right slant.

Ultimately, news readers already have plenty of news apps to choose from: there’s easily-accessible Apple News and Google News, ultra-customizable RSS-based readers like Feedly, and ML-driven apps like Newsadoo which uses a bundling function to combat biases.

Still, Reuters Institute also found that, among all the younger respondents in its 2019 study, no news app (except Reddit) was within the top 25 of apps used. We’re watching to see if the fun-sized approach hits the mark for these generations.