10 iPhone Apps For News Junkies

2016 is shaping up to be a wild year. With the election coming up in November and major world events happening seemingly every day, from the Olympics to Brexit and beyond, news lovers and the news apathetic alike are finding themselves paying a little more attention what’s going on as stories break. But in today’s world of 24-hour news cycles, it seems almost impossible to curate what you see, drown out the noise and the clickbait, and get the information you need. Whether you’re a seasoned political analyst or someone who just doesn’t want to miss what’s going on in Syria when it’s not making the top of the headlines – or even someone who only wants to know what Ryan Seacrest is up to without having to engage with all this chatter about whatever it is that’s supposed to happen in November (although, yeesh, dude) – these fantastic news apps will help you find what you’re looking for:

AP Mobile

AP Mobile is the app released by The Associated Press, which, if you don’t know, is where many news sources get their news. The app partners with local partners to provide coverage for your area as well as the original articles they’re famous for the cover breaking news nationally and globally. AP aims to provide “fast, unbiased multimedia coverage” so you’re getting, as much as possible, just the facts.

Google News & Weather

Google has done an extremely credible job creating an app that gives you a solid overview of top stories in your area, country, and globally, plus the weather. It aggregates articles from over 75,000 publications, so it offers an easy first glance of what’s happening with the option to go very, very in depth into any story should you so choose, presenting varying view points, longer pieces, opinion pieces, local perspectives and so on. While it’s maybe not the most visually stunning of the apps available to you, it’s a great way to start your day feeling well informed (and maybe be a little late to work because you went down the rabbit hole and ended up getting… almost too informed).

Yahoo News Digest

Yahoo News is a more curated news app that leads you off with summaries of 8 selected major news stories. It is probably the most user-friendly in terms of navigation and intuitive interface, though the hardest to flip through if you’re looking for a specific story. Where the two apps before this offer a slew of articles all at once sorted by category, Yahoo gives you the 8 major items of the moment ready to go, then once you’ve read them (or flipped past if you really want to skip), a fun fact and the option to continue on to “extra” news. It creates news bulletins sent to you twice a day that you can schedule for the time that best suits you and tracks what you’ve read by day. This would be a great app for someone who wants to stay up to date on the world but doesn’t have the time to sort through long think pieces to find essential information and, as a bonus, it has a beautiful (award-winning) design.

BBC News

The BBC is a trusted news source offering a global perspective. Their app functions something like AP Mobile, but with a little more personality since the BBC has a cheekier voice and a definitive point of view where AP shines in its unbiased reporting, plus the BBC covers human interest stories and British local stories that might not make it to your front page on the other similar apps. It also offers Live BBC World Service Radio, which certainly differentiates it from its competitors.

Reddit: The Official App

For the uninitiated: reddit is a wild no man’s land of news and internet commenting that is at once an incredible source for rising memes, breaking news, interesting history, beautiful photos, self help advice and beyond, and a playground for incredibly cruel internet trolls and home space for fringe communities friendly and otherwise. Famous for their “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) interviews with everyone from celebrity chefs to neuroscientists to the creator of the Klingon language, it’s the kind of site where you can choose to engage with as highbrow or lowbrow content as you want (recommended: a mix of the two). If you’re willing to brave the jungle of information, it’s an amazing beast for endless time wasting or self-educating featuring populist content – community upvoted (like a “like” on Facebook) content rises to the front page, downvoted content slips into oblivion, and you can choose which communities (subreddits) you follow. (For the initiated: this is the official reddit app. If you like reddit, think about getting it.)

BuzzFeed

It seems you would have to live under a rock to not have some knowledge of BuzzFeed these days. While their revolutionary style of pop journalism is not for everyone, those who like it will love this app. It’s a phone friendly version of the BuzzFeed site complete with quizzes, gifs, listicles, quirky videos, and digestible articles about breaking news.

Nuzzel

In the same vein as BuzzFeed and reddit tonally and philosophically, Nuzzel offers personalized social news aggregation. Nuzzel connects to your Facebook or Twitter to show you the articles and stories your friends are reading and discussing and allows you to follow ‘influencers’ and celebrities to see what they’re sharing. However, it also offers a browse section that shares certain similarities with Google News & Weather in aesthetic and structure, bringing together articles from a wide variety of sources showing top headlines by category.

Pocket

While Pocket also functions as an app where you can discover and read news, its primary function is to allow you to save articles, videos and links from almost anywhere, from your computer, from your email, from other apps, from your browser, and so on. It saves an unlimited number of items for offline access and presents them in an attractive, clean layout. The biggest argument for this app is that you never have to email yourself a link again. Ahh, my inbox.

Flipboard

If you’re looking for the happy middle ground between, well, most of these apps, Flipboard might be the app for you. It looks pretty good, it connects with your social media but isn’t social media-centric, it allows you to curate what you see based on your interests or view top stories of the day and follow hashtags, it’s generally a news aggregator (as opposed to creating original content) so you have access to articles from top publications, and it lets you easily save things for later. You can even create “magazines” – collections of stories around a theme or event to keep or share. The only issue, debatably, may be that trying to do everything can leave an app feeling spread too thin, but as compromises go, it’s the top (and very highly rated!).

Antenna Radio

Last but not least, Antenna Radio is a fantastic app if you like to get your news via radio/audio. The app is a hub for talk radio, featuring local, national, and world news plus the whole shebang of other types of talk radio on demand on your iPhone. If you just sign on, it’ll create a playlist of stories for your area on a mix of topics, or you can choose topics, channels, and favorites, and even add music from your iTunes to the mix. While not an incredibly attractive app, it’s very functional and fairly easy to use, and really the only choice for such a wide variety of talk radio pieces personalized to your taste.