Remember what life was like before mobile phones — or even before the Internet? To get the day’s latest news, you either had to make time for the morning paper or the right TV news broadcast, or hope to catch your favorite news radio station on the drive to work.
Today, news is often broadcast as it happens, and you can follow breaking news right on your mobile device. There are lots of great mobile news apps — like Circa, Umano, Google Play Newstand, News Republic, and the Nook e-reader news app, just to name a few — so you can stay informed on a variety of devices. And today’s best mobile news apps deliver more than just news articles.
Mobile news apps help you retain information
Not all of us absorb and retain information in the same manner. Educators have found that people absorb and retain information through different modes of delivery — images, spoken audio, and written words — so a really good news app has to cover all of these.
The news reader app NewsAce, for example, doesn’t limit you to newspaper and magazine articles — it also includes access to video news reports, radio reports, and printed materials. By providing a variety of news sources, the app lets you customize sources to your preferences. This also opens up options if you want news in languages other than English.
News apps with live traffic updates
Besides just weather and local events, people are more concerned than ever with international events, sports stats, and live traffic updates. Have you ever planned a day of errands, not knowing that it was going to snow late in the day, only to get stuck out and about on icy roads?
To help prevent traffic pile-ups and accidents, the US Federal Highway Association, which is part of the Department of Transportation, has set up an infrastructure of live roadway reports and weather advisories to help keep drivers informed. Of course these reports are typically in television news reports, but if you aren’t home to catch them, they do you no good. Downloading a news app to your smartphone or other mobile device helps you stay informed of road conditions, avoid bad traffic situations, and stay safe.
News apps with limitless news sources
We used to be limited in our news source options. If you lived in San Diego, odds were that you would only have access to the local papers. But now, with e-reading news apps such as Flipboard, Google Play Newsstand, or NewsAce for the Nook, you can subscribe to The New York Times, Washington Post, or any other newspaper from across the country. For an international perspective, you can subscribe to a BBC news station or a French newspaper such as Le Monde, among countless others. Many subscriptions available through news reader apps do not even require a monthly subscription fee, and those that do are nominal in comparison to print news subscription fees.
And if you lean towards a particular political slant, a news app lets you choose which slant you prefer. But keep in mind that choosing to get your news from a variety of sources will broaden your perspective and give you more of a chance to get the truth and make up your own mind about news stories.
News apps without annoying ads
You probably noticed in recent years that printed newspapers and magazines are about 40 to 50 percent advertisements. While online or mobile versions of news media also include ads, it’s easier for you to avoid digital ad banners or commercial clips in a news video than it is to avoid the ads in a printed news source, according to AllBusiness.com. This means that when you subscribe to an e-journal, digital newspaper, or other multimedia source of news through a news reader app, you actually get more news than you do in a comparable printed format.
News always at our fingertips
News reader apps like the ones offered through Apple’s App Store, Google Play Store, or Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader app store, offer us a wide variety of multimedia news resources. Whether you enjoy reading the newspaper with your morning coffee, listening to weather and traffic updates while you drive to work, or catching up on international news on your lunch break, the news you need is always at your fingertips. Having mobile news apps that can be used on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device means you do not have to wait until you are near a television or computer to get the latest news. You can stay informed and safer from wherever you are connected, and you can enjoy news from your hometown or around the world.
