As a freshman in University, I’ve often been told that the people of my generation have short attention spans. While this may not be true of all of us, it certainly can be said for a lot of the people around me. As content becomes more accessible, we have more and more content we want to consume, but the same amount of time to do it in.
That’s especially the case with news. Sitting down to read a newspaper just seems like an unnecessary and daunting task. In fact, most of the people I know just get their news from Twitter or Facebook. It is with this in mind that two brothers, William and Winston Utomo, set out to build an app called Indonesian Times.
The gist of the app is simple – it provides news articles of no longer than 100 words. By keeping it this short, the company hopes that people would be more inclined to read several articles per sitting, as opposed to just skimming through one large news story. William Utomo, the COO of Indonesian Times, tells Tech in Asia that on average, people tend to use the app for about 10 minutes per session, mostly in the morning and in the evening. “We believe that they are accessing Indonesian Times during their commute or work downtime”.
Currently, Indonesian Times obtains its information from a variety of verified sources such as CNN, Al Jazeera and Kompas and has a team of seven journalists that curates the information into shortened articles. The Utomo brothers believe that by handpicking six specific factors from the information – what, who, when, where, why and how – they are able to cut down the article to 100 words while still keeping the integrity of the information.
The app is currently only available in Indonesian and covers 10 topics. The startup plans to expand into other Southeast Asian countries in the future with local language news summaries.
This kind of news summary format is already proving popular for apps like Circa and Yahoo News Digest.
Indonesian Times faces stiff competition in the news market from well established competitors in the space such as Detik, Okezone and BaBe. However, none of these can be considered direct competition due to the unique nature of Indonesian Times’ maximum 100 word per article policy.
So far the application is available for Android on the Google Play Store. and can be accessed via a web portal as well.
Editing By Steven Millward and Charlie Custer
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