Every morning, billions of people reach for their phones to understand the world. The format waiting for them was designed in 1975.

This is a two-part piece of my thoughts on how news consumption changed, what got broken, and what the publishers missed. Then we talk about what we decided to build because of it.

The 60 Word Morning

I grew up in India, where my daily relationship with news started with a swipe. Every morning, I'd open Inshorts, a news app that compresses each story into a crisp 60-word brief and skim through national politics, global crises, startup funding rounds, maybe a bit of Bollywood gossip along the way.

Inshorts' promise was simple: headlines and facts, no fluff, personalised to what you cared about. Over time it became one of the country's most popular news apps, with more than 10 million active users at its peak. For millions of people like me, it quietly reset expectations. News should be quick, snackable, and always within thumb's reach.

That expectation never left me. But the world it was built for has changed dramatically.

When News Became a Lifeline

When COVID-19 hit, news stopped being a background habit and became a lifeline. Global lockdowns pushed audiences online, and demand for real-time updates on case counts, restrictions, and economic fallout sent digital news engagement soaring. People weren't just casually checking headlines anymore, they were refreshing apps, following live blogs, and obsessively tracking charts because the news suddenly had direct consequences for their safety and livelihoods.

At the same time, attention spans were under pressure. Between anxiety, remote work, and doomscrolling, people wanted information that was not just fast, but trustworthy and easy to share or debate with others. Two things happened simultaneously: the appetite for news grew, and the tolerance for friction collapsed.

The Multi-Format Explosion

Short-form content platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Snapchat rewired how the mainstream consumes stories altogether. For a large share of Gen Z and younger audiences, these feeds are not just entertainment — they're where news appears first. The numbers are striking.

According to Pew Research Center's 2024 Social Media and News Fact Sheet, more than half of US adults (54%) now get news from social media at least sometimes, up from 48% in 2021. Among TikTok users specifically, 52% say they regularly get news from the platform, up from just 22% in 2020, the fastest rise in news consumption of any social platform measured. In total, about 17% of all US adults now say they regularly get their news from TikTok.

Publishers quickly followed the audience: outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post now produce vertical explainers, swipeable image carousels, and short clips tailored to these platforms. These pieces are often designed as top-of-funnel content, 30 seconds of context and a call to action to draw viewers back into their own apps and websites where longer, richer coverage lives.

But even as short-form video surged, the opposite end of the spectrum was booming. Commuters stuck in traffic, runners on early-morning routes, and people doing chores at home increasingly turned to 30 or 60-minute podcast episodes to go deeper into a story. Podcast listening has grown steadily year over year, with more people making it a daily habit as routines returned post-pandemic.

In other words, audiences were not choosing one format over another, they were choosing based on context. Sprinting to the subway? A 60-second clip. Long train ride? A 40-minute conversation. This forced publishers to retell the same core story across formats: short clips, long podcasts, articles, and explainers, each calibrated for a different moment, attention span, and level of depth.

Today, a single news event might exist as a 30-second TikTok, a 5-minute vertical explainer, a 1,200-word article, and a 30-minute podcast episode. A curious reader who really wants to understand what's going on might encounter the story in their social feed first, then search for a longer video on YouTube, then skim a written explainer, and finally land in a community discussion or fact-check thread.

What used to be a single touchpoint, reading yesterday's paper, is now a fragmented journey across apps, formats, and communities.

The Hidden Problem: Format Without Trust

In the current news climate, narratives around major stories are shaped by a messy mix of influencers, creators, publishers, and traditional outlets, each with their own incentives and biases. Some prioritise speed over accuracy, others chase virality, and a few openly push agendas.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024 — based on a YouGov survey of over 95,000 online news consumers across 47 markets — found that 39% of respondents say they sometimes or often avoid the news entirely. The primary driver isn't disinterest. It's being overwhelmed. Too many sources, too many formats, too much noise — and no single place that pulls it together in a way you can trust.

Research on social media shows that people who primarily rely on these platforms for news are often less informed and more exposed to unproven or misleading claims compared with those who lean on dedicated news sites or TV. Validating what is actually true is not an optional extra but has become a critical part of consuming news.

Pew Research's 2024 study of the four major social platforms found that roughly a quarter or more of news consumers on each platform say they at least fairly often see news that seems inaccurate.

Validating what's actually true has become a critical — and exhausting — part of consuming news, not an optional extra.

That's where online communities step in as an informal layer of collective fact-checking. Platforms like Reddit host thousands of posts linking to news stories that attract verification comments. People don’t just scroll Reddit for extra context; they also read the comments to understand how different groups interpret the same story, which claims are being challenged, and what additional sources are being surfaced to support or refute it.

One large-scale study analysing roughly 29,000 such posts and 9.8 million comments found that threads where information was confirmed as true often drove more engagement than those debunked as false, highlighting how community validation shapes attention.

On X (formerly Twitter), Community Notes allows users to collaboratively attach context and corrections directly under misleading posts, and AI systems i.e. Grok are being tested to help surface relevant sources and verify claims at scale.

For the average reader, the reality is still exhausting. To feel confident about just one important story, you might watch a short clip on Instagram, listen to a podcast episode on your commute, skim a couple of articles, and read through Reddit threads to see how others are interpreting and challenging the narrative. Only after this multi-step, multi-platform, multi-format journey do you start to feel like you "get" the story — and even then, you might still be unsure what to trust.

Our information diet has never been richer in formats, but also never more fragmented and fragile in trust.

Burden on the Reader

For the average reader, though, the reality is still exhausting. To feel confident about just one important story, you might watch a short clip on Instagram or TikTok, listen to a podcast episode on your commute, skim a couple of articles, and then read through Reddit threads or Community Notes on X to see how others are interpreting and challenging the narrative. Only after this multi-step, multi-platform, multi-format journey do you start to feel like you “get” the story and even then, you might still be unsure what to trust. Our information diet has never been richer in formats, but also never more fragmented and fragile in trust.

The Format Hasn't Changed

Here's what I learned from the inside.

During my time on the constent & monetization team at The Washington Post, I saw product innovation happening constantly, new subscription flows, engagement experiments, format testing at the article level. What I didn't see was anyone questioning the article itself. The inverted pyramid, the headline, the byline, these are conventions from print journalism that have survived the entire internet era untouched. Publishers have innovated everything around the format: distribution (social, push, email), the business model (subscriptions, paywalls, metered access), the discovery surface (personalisation, notifications). But the atomic unit of news, the article, is structurally identical to what ran in a newspaper in 1975.

The referrer data tells the real story. For most major publishers, the top traffic sources are social platforms, feeds and apps built around short-form, visual, swipeable content. The format that actually acquires a reader is TikTok's or Instagram's. The publisher captures them for 90 seconds on an article page, then loses them back to the feed. The audience belongs to the platform, not the publisher.

The Reuters Institute's 2024 industry survey confirmed this: publishers said they were planning significant increases in short-form video production for TikTok (+55 net investment score) and YouTube (+44) — not because they're leading the format shift, but because they're chasing an audience that moved without them. Publishers are optimising for the reader they have. Nobody is designing for the reader they're losing.

That gap is exactly what led to TunedIn.

Introducing TunedIn — What We're Building

TunedIn is a multimodal short-form content platform built for how people actually consume information today. How people actually do it, bouncing between apps, formats, and communities, trying to stitch together a complete picture of something that matters to them.

The core bet: treat any piece of content from any publisher or creator as raw material, and reformat it into whatever shape the moment demands.

The Core Experience

A single story in TunedIn is not an article. It's a story object, a swipeable, multimodal narrative that weaves together the article, the relevant video explainer, the podcast clip where an expert went deep on exactly this point, the Reddit thread where the community pushed back, and the tweet from the journalist who broke it. All of it, in one place, in a format you can consume on the subway in 90 seconds or sit with for 20 minutes if you want to go deep.

The feed learns. TunedIn tracks watch history, scroll depth, interaction signals (likes, comments, saves), and general reading patterns to surface what's relevant to you, not what's trending for everyone, but what's next for you specifically. The same story is presented differently depending on how you read: a skimmer gets the takeaways first; a deep reader gets context and analysis; a visual learner gets led by the images and video.

The Story Pipeline

Long-form articles are automatically converted into 3–10 swipeable story slides — Instagram/Snapchat-style — calibrated for mobile-first consumption. The pipeline uses an LLM to extract key sections, generate slide-sized summaries (50–150 words each), and assemble a fixed narrative arc: an intro slide, content slides that alternate text-heavy and media-rich layouts, and a final takeaways slide with three key bullet points.

Slide count scales with article length: short pieces become 3 slides, pieces over 2,000 words hit the 10-slide maximum. Every story passes a quality gate before storage, minimum slide count, verified media coverage, a floor on description length relative to the original article — so nothing gets surfaced half-finished.

The same story reported across multiple outlets is stitched together, with sourcing made visible. You see how the BBC framed it, how the Times framed it, and what the difference tells you. Media bias isn't lectured about — it's made observable.

The Community Layer

Comments in TunedIn is a credibility layer. Users earn subject-matter expert (SME) badges based on their reading and engagement history within specific topics. A reader who consistently engages with sports coverage, over time, surfaces higher in comment threads on sports stories, lending community-validated credibility to the reporting. This is balanced against upvotes, downvotes, and recency signals to prevent gaming. An in-feed AI assistant lets users call on AI to clarify claims, research a topic, or surface sources without leaving the feed closer to Community Notes than a chatbot.

Sharing is designed to be contextually rich. When you share a story, you share a screenshot of your current view, not just a bare link, giving the person on the other end immediate visual context. Native to WhatsApp, Messages, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, Discord.

Why This, Why Now

The macro conditions for this product are better now than they have ever been.

The Reuters Institute's 2024 report documents explicitly: "publishers are exploring different formats as a way of addressing the engagement challenge." Two-thirds of the 95,000-person global survey access short news videos weekly. News avoidance is at 39% and rising, not because people don't care, but because the current experience is exhausting. At the same time, the tools to do this — LLMs capable of high-quality summarisation, multimodal embeddings, real-time content APIs — only exist at accessible cost from roughly 2023 onward.

The format shift is documented. The audience is there. The infrastructure now exists. What's missing is a product that treats format as the core design decision.