bmusto19

For sure, our beta is pretty bare bones but we'll refine it over the next few months, especially after we get feedback from our planned beta launch at the end of the month

Could you explain this a bit more? I'm not sure I'm following how this would be implemented

It's great to know other people are also trying to tackle this problem! I agree, the titles of news stories are often to grab one's attention rather than convey the true contents of a story, and we're still trying to solve this problem. Perhaps some feature that visualizes the mood/ topic of a story based on the full text, but it's a difficult problem to solve. We're open to suggestions though!

We've updated the frontpage so that the video plays from youtube now, let us know if you guys keep running into issues watching it!

Makes sense. Do you mean deep-dive topic pages on specific events such as the syrian civil war, for example?

User-configurable does sound like a good option, hopefully something we can integrate into the site soon

Great point, we'll have to work on that going forward. We've been using AP News as our main source for the moment as it is fairly neutral, but we're looking for ways to handle different sources going forward. We went with google but are open to other suggestions for future forms

Thanks, we think so as well :)

Thanks for the feedback! That's something we've been thinking of implementing, perhaps with a search feature as well. And we'll definitely try to reach out to Austen, especially with his success in the startup world. Are there any other people/ companies/ startups you'd suggest reaching out to for feedback? We've mainly talked to professors/ business leaders from Brandeis University and a few professionals in the news industry.

We are still working on our pricing model but right now we are looking at a doing freemium model. Free version would have some limitations (ex: a limited number of news sources that stories can be pulled from, so choosing 3 sources from list of options) but the average user would still get a ton out of the site. Premium version would be subscription based, giving users full range of features (ex: pulling from as many news sources as you wish). We would love feedback on any suggestions for pricing though, we'll be tinkering and tailoring it based on how the beta goes/ what changes we make to the site + idea

Thank you for the feedback! We're also really liking the timeline aspect of the stie, but we still think there's ways to incorporate at least some sort of graph model as well. This might be something we'd A/B test