AsiaOne treats 'Newstritional Disorder' with AI-driven news curation

Singapore news portal AsiaOne has launched NewsLite, an AI-driven newsfeed that is “trained” to pick out relevant bites from news articles written by human journalists. Targeted at readers who are avid consumers of news but have limited time to spare, NewsLite’s main target audience is commuters, who do not have the luxury of time to read an entire newspaper but want to power through news stories on their commute.

With NewsLite, according to AsiaOne it is possible to catch up on an entire day’s worth of relevant stories within 30 minutes. A limited trial of NewsLite in July showed greater reader engagement than a comparable landing page on AsiaOne, with web analytics showing over 40% longer session durations for users experiencing the NewsLite microsite. 

The idea behind this initiative came after a study on news consumption habits of young adults aged 18 to 34 years old across the US, UK and India. The study found that the overabundance of information led consumers of media to experience what the study labelled as “Newstritional Disorder”, which entailed the trouble with keeping up with news stories that were too long or too in-depth. The study further suggested a new bite-size media model to “reduce news fat, cut back on content, and create tasty treats that required fewer mental calories to digest.”

Following this shift in behaviour, NewsLite delivered its latest headlines, along with two to six bullet points of content, while hyperlinks beneath the bullet points took readers to the full article for deeper context. The innovation arrived in the form of a natural language programming (NLP) algorithm that writes the bullet points in lieu of a human operator. Engineers at AsiaOne trained an artificial intelligence model to identify and paraphrase written content for the NewsLite feature. The model was then further tested and refined by AsiaOne’s editorial team.

Gary Goh, product director for AsiaOne said the NewsLite editorial system, powered by machine learning, helped the company’s platform deliver news faster in a processed format that allowed for more convenient consumption without being overwhelmed by excessive details.

Separately, AsiaOne recently unveiled a new logo along with a refreshed website design, to kick off its 25th anniversary in February this year. Evolving the iconic yellow to a zestier orange colour, AsiaOne looked to reflect how far it had come in the past year while retaining elements of the "off-centre, on trend" DNA of the publication.

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