Meet Microsoft News: A new way to stay informed across the Web, Windows 10, iOS and Android

Meet Microsoft News: A new way to stay informed across the Web, Windows 10, iOS and Android

Microsoft has been in the news business for more than 23 years. When we launched MSN in 1995, the news industry was just beginning to provide content online. The period that followed was one of dramatic change and reinvention, forcing news organizations to re-think their programming and business strategies. We changed, too, from a feature of Windows 95 to a network of web and app experiences that now reaches nearly half a billion people in more than 140 countries and 28 languages. As we’ve evolved, our central mission has remained the same: to keep our audience informed in an easily accessible, comprehensive and trustworthy way.

Today, we’re excited to share the next step in our evolution – Microsoft News.

What is Microsoft News? 

Microsoft News is the new name for our news engine that powers familiar sites like MSN.com, and our newly redesigned Microsoft News app for iOS and Android. Microsoft News also powers news on Microsoft Edge, the News app in Windows 10, Skype, Xbox and Outlook.com.

Microsoft News represents the ways we keep people informed across the web, phone and PC, using our long-tested approach of curating news via publishing partnerships, human editors, and AI. We work with more than a thousand premium publishers and more than 3,000 brands in all major global markets – like USA Today, The New York Times, FOX News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Welt, El País, BBC News, Kyodo News, and many more – to aggregate the best news, videos, photos and other content and deliver it, for free, to people all over the world.

Microsoft News makes it easy for you to personalize your news experience, including prioritizing your favorite topics on MSN.com or selecting interests to follow in your news feed on the Microsoft Edge Start page and our apps on Windows 10, iOS and Android, so you can quickly get to the information you want most when and where you want it. We also enable our many publishing partners to connect with new audiences and earn money for their content at a time when that is crucial to the survival of the industry – so they can continue to invest in high-quality, credible journalism.

Microsoft News for iOS and Android

You can experience the best of what Microsoft News has to offer in our newly redesigned Microsoft News app for iOS and Android, available today. The app makes it easy to get news wherever you are, focused on the topics you care about most – like having your own portable newsroom.

The app has been completely redesigned into a modern and beautiful experience tailored to iOS and Android devices. Here are some of our favorite new features:

• New personalization upgrades, including the ability to tailor interests to follow in your news feed – such as World News, Personal Finance, Fitness and many more – and to roam interests across devices and local news options for top cities
• Easy to configure breaking news alerts
• A new dark theme, enabling better night reading
• Simplified access through seamless integration with iOS and Android widgets
• Continuous reading, for a smooth content experience

Get the app now.

Supporting the publishing ecosystem and quality journalism

We know we can’t do it alone. We may have decades of news experience under our belt but there are many institutions that have been at it much, much longer. These institutions have defined what we think of as quality journalism through years of essential reporting.

We believe that a free, well-funded press is a critical part of our social fabric and are proud to partner with the world’s best news brands, offering a business model that gives people access, at no-cost, to trustworthy news and provides a sustainable source of revenue for publishers. In just the past four years we’ve delivered more than $600 million back to our publishers, enabling them to focus on what they do best: quality journalism.

“Microsoft has been a great partner over the last several years, working closely with our newsroom and collaborating as they consider new features and services. We appreciate partners like Microsoft who value trusted reporting and seek ways to elevate and share premium journalism to millions of readers who are looking for information from a reliable source.”

— Maribel Wadsworth, publisher of USA TODAY and president, USA TODAY NETWORK

“Microsoft is a great partner for us because it offers both impressive reach and a well-earned reputation as a trusted source of news.”

— Rich Kennedy, SVP of Business Development, Business Insider

“We are very happy that Microsoft is investing further in highlighting valuable and trusted sources of news. The launch of Microsoft News is another positive proof point of publisher-platform relationships strengthening and we look forward to seeing what’s to come.”

— Matt Dornic, VP for Communications and Digital Partnerships, CNN

“Microsoft has been a valued partner in delivering CBSN’s live, 24/7 news coverage and analysis to an expansive audience that’s hungry for quality news and information. We look forward to continuing our strong relationship.”

— Christy Tanner, Executive Vice President and General Manager, CBS News Digital

“MSN delivers premium content at scale and high ad viewability that truly performs for our advertisers.”

— Jeff Lucas, Head of Americas Sales and Global Teams, Oath

“As part of our strategic partnership with Microsoft, Taboola powers content recommendations across Microsoft’s consumer properties in 55 markets and localized for 22 languages. We work together to create highly personalized experiences for consumers, drive engagement, monetization, increase awareness for Microsoft’s internal promotions and enable audience growth. We have seen in our three years of partnership that Microsoft audiences are incredibly valuable. When looking at Microsoft News users discovering content, as opposed to people coming from social or search, they engage 2-3x more, and in many ways are ‘super users’.”

— Adam Singolda, Founder and CEO, Taboola

Curated news by editors

Every day, our publishing partners send us more than 100,000 unique pieces of content.  Our AI scans the content as it arrives, processes it to understand dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content and potential popularity and then presents it for our editors. Our algorithms suggest appropriate photos to pair with content to help bring stories to life. Editors then curate the top stories throughout the day, across a variety of topics, so our readers get the latest news from the best sources.

This curation process is global, using editors with local expertise. Today, there are more than 800 editors working from 50 locations around the world – including editorial newsrooms serving multiple regions in India, Germany, France, Mexico, Canada and Spain. Many of our editors have extensive backgrounds in media and journalism and have worked at a variety of news organizations including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Globe and Mail, Newsday, NBCSports.com, Seattle Times, Asahi Shimbun and Associated Press.

Diversity, in our newsroom and in the publishers we partner with, is a key ingredient of the Microsoft News experience. We carefully compose our pages every day to present multiple sides of a story and consciously curate a wide variety of opinion pieces so that our readers can explore issues via new and different perspectives. We believe thoughtful opinion pieces—which we clearly mark as such—help readers better understand the news. With that goal in mind, we’re always assessing our network of partners to ensure that we provide the most diverse, credible and well-rounded content available.

At Microsoft News, we’re constantly refining and improving our experiences to continue to serve the needs of people and partners around the globe. We hope you will visit MSN.com, the Microsoft Edge Start page and give the new app a try!

Source: Meet Microsoft News: A new way to stay informed across the Web, Windows 10, iOS and Android