The actual articles displayed in the app are curated from news websites and are available without paywalls or subscription requirements. (Yahoo News partners with more than 1,000 publishers who get paid based on revenue-sharing agreements. It’s kind of like Spotify, but for news.)
The first steps require minimal effort. When you launch it, the app asks you to select five or more news topics that interest you, such as politics, science, gaming and climate. From there, a combination of algorithmic curation and some human action by people with editorial roles at Yahoo News determine what you see. Additional customization options allow you to block individual posts or keywords if you never want to see them in your feed again. (Something like “Elon” for example.)
Downes Mulder says what you see in the new Yahoo News app is the result of a careful balance between AI and editorial decision-making. It’s tailored to your interests while also featuring a top stories section that shows what Yahoo considers the most important stories of the day. These are decided through a symbiotic process where AI flags stories that seem to have more weight or interest from users, and people in editorial roles at Yahoo News decide to include the stories that seem most important. The team also wants to keep the app from being annoying, and Yahoo says it’s being intentional about which notifications annoy you.
“People want places to spend their time that will help them save time and get things done,” says Downs Mulder. “And in this case, it’s to inform each other, to have things to talk about.”
Tomorrow’s headlines
Yet the main problems with recommendation algorithms that aggressively track user behavior and promote high-engagement news stories are that they often reinforce bias and can lead to the spread of misinformation. If you can choose exactly what news sources and what kinds of stories you want delivered to you, there’s a risk that you’ll be locked into an echo chamber. Downes Mulder says Yahoo tries to walk the ethical tightrope of delivering what users want to read without causing unpleasant side effects.
“I really like the way this app has come together because it balances Top Stories with ‘for you’ in a way that will give you that awareness of what I need to know and what I want to know,” Downs Mulder says. “This is what will prevent the reader from going too far down the rabbit hole.”
Another of Artifact’s anti-bias features that appears in the redesign is the ability to rewrite clickbait titles on the fly. Users who see a headline that looks like clickbait can flag it, and after enough people report it, the headline will be replaced in the app with a clearer, often more direct rewrite. New headlines are compiled by the generative AI engine and fine-tuned by Yahoo’s human news curators.
To keep people clicking, the Yahoo News app also includes an element of gamification, where the app tracks how many articles you’ve read and gives you funny headlines to mark your level of effort. Read enough stories and you will be rewarded with a badge. For example, reading one story earns you the title of Learner, while reaching 250 reads designates you as a Sage, which Yahoo says designates you as “one of Yahoo News’ best readers” within the app.
Articulating the News app could also pave the way for future features at Yahoo. Downs Mulder envisions a future where these reading badges are paid out in a more limited way. If someone is classified as a sage, they may be treated as having more authority or trust in the wider Yahoo community.
Some previous Artifact features have not made their way into the new Yahoo News. The pre-Yahoo version of Artifact included a feature that used AI voices to read articles aloud, including AI-generated voices that sounded like rapper Snoop Dogg and non-rapper Gwyneth Paltrow, among others. That option isn’t in Yahoo News yet, though when asked about it, Downes Mulder said that more features are coming to the Yahoo News app in the near future, and some of them will be along those lines. “I would encourage you to stay online,” she says.
