To help people keep up with the 2016 election season, mobile media magazine app Flipboard will be launching its first destination site, called 2016 Election Central.
The section is being launched with the help of CNN and The Washington Post, and will offer political news packages aimed at helping users keep up with the latest election news.
"Mobile devices are how millions of people keep up with the news every day. But information is still spread across websites and social networks, and it's hard to get the full picture or different points of view," said Gabriella Schwarz, Flipboard news editor, in a statement. "We built Election Central to bring insightful political coverage and the best campaign moments together, but more importantly we also want it to be a very personal place, where the reader can go deep on just what interests them."
Within the app, content will be divided into different sections for different topics. These sections will include "The Issues," "The Candidates," "The Politics," " Top Stories," and "Flipboard's Political Rundown," which will feature the top 10 stories of that week. The Washington Post will supply detailed posts about each of the candidates, while CNN will offer coverage of the polling and debates, which can be found in the tab called "The Politics."
For those that missed the first GOP debate Aug. 6, the app and website are full of stories related to how different candidates fared and the stances they took on different issues.
Content is chosen based on a mixture of Flipboard's human-curated choices and picks by an algorithm that displays articles based on items such as how many Likes a story gets, the source, the number of flips or shares, and how long someone spends on it.
The concept is certainly interesting and will be an experiment for Flipboard to see if users like destination websites and apps as a way of interacting with Flipboard content. Getting expertise from CNN and The Washington Post is also a good decision, and should lend some credibility to the experiment. It comes at a good time as well, with an avalanche of election-related news set to hit news sites. It will be nice to have a central place to get all election news. The site will be accessible from both a mobile app and from the web.
Flipboard's Election Central channel from within the main Flipboard app has already been covering the election process, organizing content based on the issue at hand. These issues include the threat of ISIS, legalization of marijuana, racial issues in America, health care, free trade, and so on. By looking a little deeper into each subject, users can learn more about different opinions on the issues at hand as well as where each candidate stands on the issue. Flipboard itself says that it will not censor content and aims to provide an unbalanced opinion.
"It's about letting people form their own opinion and see what's good or bad about the candidates," said Schwarz in an interview with VentureBeat.
2016 Election Central will be available until December 2016. To access it, go to Flipboard's mobile app and under the Explore tab look for the banner link, or search for @2016Election.
Via: TechCrunch
