The Volv smartphone app condenses news articles down to their bare essentials, with the goal of ... [+]
It was while working on their first startup, a social initiative called Benefactory that launched a campaign to help migrants at the border, when colleagues Shannon Almeida and Priyanka Vazirani realized something was fundamentally broken in the way the news media was talking about the crisis.
Not only was sensationalized news spreading “like wildfire,” the co-founders lament today about the experience. But things like far-right rhetoric describing the influx of migrants at the border as akin to an “invasion” — not to mention the bias and racism inherent in characterizations of the migrants as thugs and criminals — reached such a fever pitch that some nonprofits didn’t even want to work with Benefactory anymore. Or they preferred to do it quietly and hide the fact they were aiding migrants, fearful of blowback.
The co-founders sent out emails, cold, to celebrities, asking if they might get involved with this effort, and some did. Kerry Washington, Ilana Glazer and others lent their voice to this cause. But something stuck with the co-founders, about the insidious power of media bias. “That’s when we decided that media bias is the root cause of the problem we need to fight,” Vazirani told me. “We started looking around at millennials and other people like ourselves, thinking there had to be something available that we would want to use.”
Not finding a suitable news product sufficiently free of bias, Almeida and Vazirani decided to build one themselves. The result: Volv, a smartphone app they launched right at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic that’s meant for people like themselves. Generally young news consumers, hungry for authoritative content, frustrated by the prevalence of bias, and amenable to something like the Volv user experience — which is described as a kind of TikTok, but for news.
The app reworks published news stories so that only the most important component parts remain. The bare essence, distilled into a few sentences that can be read by the user in no more than 9 seconds. The TikTok style comes into play by users swiping through the easily digestible news summaries.
“There are really three problems we solve” with Volv, Vazirani told me in a joint interview with Almeida (both of whom are 28). One problem is the unfortunate reality that too many of us have a declining attention span, for all the obvious reasons.
“That’s why we decided on 9 seconds. The second problem we solve is that of information overload. With Instagram, Clubhouse, newspapers, literally everything out there — it just becomes too much. We just wanted something more streamlined. And, three, obviously the most important problem is that of media bias. We keep everything in a simple manner, offer just the facts and let people decided what they think about the news.”
A certain kind of journalism veteran might find themselves horrified at the prospect of a smartphone app like Volv ripping the guts out of their story, leaving only a skeletal, fact-heavy blurb remaining for the reader. But there is more going on here than a kind of smash-it-all-down, reductive approach that a cynic might feel the app is taking. You could snidely dismiss a news product like this as dumbing down content for a smartphone-addicted generation of consumers. But you’d not only be wrong — you’d be missing the point entirely.
Volv co-founders Shannon Almeida and Priyanka Vazirani.
Mainstream news publishers, in fact, have sprung up in recent years in response to the exact same set of challenges Volv decided to grapple with. Outlets like Insider and Axios were launched with a focus on brevity and writing news content that’s much more snackable and comfortable to read on a smartphone, rather than a 1,500-word New York Times story that most people probably wouldn’t read past the juicy anecdote and quotes at the top, anyway.
“Our audience is smart already but they are always hungry to get smarter, faster,” Axios explains in a kind of company manifesto in the “About” section on its website. “We resist traffic-based assumptions to dumb things down, and focus our efforts on pinpointing the reason the news matters to you. Your time is valuable, so we strive to sort through all of the noise to bring you substantive and meaningful content that is truly worthy of your time.”
This is precisely what Volv is attempting, and continuing to refine after launching during the extraordinary pandemic year, getting early advice from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban as well as pre-seed funding through Snap’s accelerator Yellow. “When he first looked at the app,” Almeida told me about Cuban, “he was in the first 1,500 users we had on the app, and at that time we focused on the serious side (of news). He said, this is becoming too serious — maybe look at younger content. Focus on social media, song drops. I think he nudged us in the direction of having a younger angle to it.”
Adds Vazirani: “I think, after last year, we had to revisit our entire concept of news. People were telling us the news is so stressful, and they’re stepping back more for their mental health and not looking at the news
“We knew we had to balance the heavy news with something positive and much lighter, to make the experience for the user calm so that it’s not too overwhelming. It’s not just about world news and politics and finance. Also what’s trending in celebrity news and on TikTok.”
Right now, the Volv team — which includes writers who condense news stories from authoritative sources like The New York Times — publishes around 60 stories a day through the app. Onboarding new users is also lightning fast; it took me about 15 seconds from the time I downloaded the app and set up my preferences, until I was swiping away and reading through the app’s news stories for the day (which included blurbs on NFTs, the death of Prince Philip, and some urgent climate change news).
The app recently crossed an impressive milestone, with its users having swiped through 8 million of the app’s stories. And speaking of which, if you want to spend more time with a specific piece of news, there’s a “Check it out” button that takes you right to the source of the news — the app, by the way, is also free to use.
“We haven’t really decided on a monetization plan, but as of right now we’re not happy with (the prospect of) ads,” Vazirani told me. “We’re exploring all this right now, but our main goal is just to focus on the user experience and build up our user base.”
