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by bArray 2255 days ago
What kinds of problems would you face in creating a news app? Surely content delivery is the same as that through the web page and for displaying the content you just use some cross-platform UI library?

(From somebody on the outside with absolutely no idea.)
3 comments
alex_duf 2255 days ago
There's a little bit more to our news app than content delivery, even though content delivery is indeed the crux of the problem. Regarding the content itself, it's a more complex than a wall of text, so we need support for each type of content. Our content is also served differently for the website and for the mobile app as we've got an API in there, though both the website and the mobile api are communicating with what we call the content API.

Both the Guardian and the BBC have separate iOS and Android teams, I'm part of the server side team. We touched about how to organise the teams, how to handle request from editorial, how to test and release the app etc.

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stdbrouw 2255 days ago
In the lingo, a "news app" is typically some sort of interactive presentation of one particular story, and depending on the story may allow the user to filter or visualize something from a database, it might change the information based on where you live and it can include interactive maps or charts or calculators or even mini games to illustrate a particular concept. So these are one-off projects made to deadline, not a generic mobile app for reading the news.
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bargle0 2255 days ago
Like that coronavirus WaPo article[1] from last month with the interactive graphs?

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-si...

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stdbrouw 2255 days ago
Yup!
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pbhjpbhj 2255 days ago
I was thinking the scope might include news acquisition (creation!?) and not just publishing.
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alex_duf 2255 days ago
That wasn't part of these exchanges, but yes we produce the tools for that in house.

The Grid is a good example of what's been produced in house, and it's actually open source (and I think being used by the BBC?) https://github.com/guardian/grid

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bArray 2255 days ago
Huh, interesting idea... I guess such a thing could be quite interesting for some short form updates (i.e. live from a conference). You'd probably want that to go through some kind of editor right? I just assumed it would be a news-reader/viewer.
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alex_duf 2255 days ago
We do indeed have what essentially is a text-editor with Guardian specific features developed in house.

It's used for all of our content, but specifically what you're referring to are liveblogs, where a journalist can write short content and append it to the existing article.

Here's an example of such an article https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/23/coronavir...

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