The NewFocus
Development of a Google Chrome Extension
Project Objective:
The objective of the project was to improve readership around young Singapore in a non-distracting and productive way.
Role:
Front-End Developer
Softwares Used:
Figma
The Problem
In recent years, the issue of fake news has constantly been spotlighted. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, more than half of 74,000 people surveyed are concerned about reading news that are completely made up. Furthermore, political leaders have also stepped up to clamp down on fake news or in worse scenarios, discredit news that are not in favour of them, causing the works of professional journalists to often be called into question.
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Another issue that has surfaced is the sheer volume of news being disseminated every day. The pressure to become a top information provider may lead to a “quantity over quality” effect. The many channels available have also led to the ease of information sharing, but this has also resulted in duplication of information, and there is no quick way to compare and evaluate these information sources.
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Client profile - The New Paper
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Strengths
The New Paper (TNP) has done consistently well in reporting human-interest stories. This is evident from Chartbeat, a tool that ranks the performance of news stories based on web traffic. Most of the stories that perform well are human-interest stories. TNP has also received praise for their in-depth and fair reporting when it came to stories like the HIV data leak and Aloysius Pang’s death. It is also currently the only freesheet in Singapore, reaching close to 600,000 readers.
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Challenges
However, TNP faces several challenges. Firstly, it has been struggling to shed its tabloid roots, despite merging with freesheet My Paper in 2016 due to an internal restructuring. In the merger, TNP revamped their freesheet to look more like a traditional newspaper layout with less emphasis on eye-catching photos and infographics, and more emphasis on columns of text. It also added in business sections and switched its target demographic to cater towards the professionals, managers, engineers and technicians (PMET) group instead of the general mass audience it was doing so before.
The Solution
Based on our problem statement, we zoomed in on a few key words – “personalised news content”, “feeling overwhelmed” and “irrelevant news”. We approached it with the intention to help newsreaders cope with the issue of being bombarded by overwhelming information. We focussed on personalisation of news content by catering to what a reader needs at different times of the day as we realised a key part of what we learnt about our users was that the type of news they accessed differed at different times of the day, according to their needs and the time they had to do so.
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Our MVP product is The New Focus: a Chrome extension that allows readers to cut through the clutter of endless news updates and discover what matters, when it matters – to read with a new focus.
The Reflection
The New Paper is a paper that continues to have a strong fanbase of offline readers due to its free printed edition, but it struggles internally to keep its digital offering alive due to a dearth of headcount in that area. By providing an automated solution to attract newer users, The New Paper’s team can rest easy knowing that the Chrome extension is providing updates without needing any human support from the TNP team. Users also face an increasingly crowded marketplace of information that is irrelevant to their needs being pushed down platforms that they subscribe to. By providing a Chrome extension that lives on the laptop, the place they spend half of their day at, they can take breaks by checking the extension for news and information that is curated to their daily reading habits and interests. With future customisation options being planned, The New Focus hopes to be a platform for users to cut through the noise and see what matters to them.