The rise of the throwaway news app

The rise of the throwaway news app

Permit me to make a very big deal out of a very, very small slice of the history of journalism. In the mid-2000s, when newspapers were still quite large and fully panicking about what to do about the digital product, a movement formed around what ended up being called news apps. Now, young reader, today we think of “apps” meaning “phone” but this is the pre-iPhone days. What news apps developers made in the mid to late 2000s were websites. But n…