NewsBreak: Local News & Alerts 12+

In the past few months, my mom and I’ve switched to get my news through Newsbreak. Its entire news feed revolves around our personal interests. I like the way they present the “Following” tab as well as “For You” tab, both delivering personalized news feed. I am also impressed by the numerous good-quality sources they have, which seems to be the key metrics for a good news app right now. The full coverage of local news is the reason my mom love this app and choose it, as my family can get the latest news from our county and the news around the world.
I do not get swamped with push notifications that much. .. the notifications I do receive are nice and gentle reminders of good stories that are available to read, which also reminds me that I have the application (which is nice! ). The only glitch is that sometimes they get me the old news stories in the notification, which confused me a little bit. I am looking forward to a way to report this error to the team so that they can do something about it. General speaking, Newsbreak is my favorite news app among several for now!

Thanks for your positive feedback, Chrisz!
To keep focusing on “local news,” News Break will be initiating a series of updates that revolve around your local community. From Local Classifieds to inviting more media publishers in your neighborhood to partner with us. Please stay excited about the updates!

I downloaded this app to keep up to date with some things in Orlando while I’m here. Upon looking through various articles on the app, not only did I find that a lot of them were irrelevant to the news I actually needed, (news about crimes, laws, COVID-19 rules and so on), I noticed that the comments of most articles are just filled to the brim with spam, toxicity and hate speech toward one race. With especially a lot of hate toward black people. Every article I saw that included a black person or had nothing to do with black people always had a bunch of users in the comments going “stupid black people are the devil race” or “black people cannot be as smart as white people”. There have been other statements and even more horrible and derogatory ones the further you look into them. There are literal accounts on this platform dedicated just to hating on another race/ethnicity and it’s as if no one is watching over the community and moderating these comments/accounts. It really does not create a positive experience for anyone on the app and it sure doesn’t create one for anyone actually leaving useful comments under the articles. Like I said, this is a decent app for keeping up with local news in your area and has the potential to be on the level of an app like Citizen, but I would really like for there to be an option to report entire accounts rather than just block them. As of this review being posted, I have deleted the app.

Thank you for downloading NewsBreak. We're sorry you encountered inappropriate racial comments in the app. We're working hard to remove them as we speak. We do NOT support racism or intolerance of others. Please report comments as you see them, we are actively monitoring reports. 

UPDATE: the SmartNews app is where it’s at. No troll comments, just plain local news from REAL news sources. No video feed of violence and death, like the NewsBreak app (which I don’t know how they get away with that.) Apple shouldn’t allow NewsBreak to advertise because of how incredibly violent its videos are. SMARTNEWS people! Ditch this cr-app and get real news without the blatant misinformation.

I have no idea how many accounts I’ve blocked on here because there is no way to view that data. I can go to an article with 200 comments and see 3, then block them because they claim ridiculous notions. The UX to report misinformation and block is terrible. But don’t go to the comment sections to have reasonable debate, but do if you enjoy complete discourse. I accidentally went to the video section. This app appears to do NOTHING to filter out violent content. In fact, this is the only app I know that’s available that has almost exclusively videos of people punching each other, or many other types of bodily harm. Although News Break does allow me to see my local news in a single place, I can’t say it’s worth the utter perpetuation of what is absolutely wrong with platforms that spread misinformation and where trolls go to thrive. Please don’t even respond to this review and say “thank you” and “we are working to make it better” because you’re not. And why would you when you are getting cheap clicks and engagement with garbage.

Thank you for downloading NewsBreak. We're sorry you encountered inappropriate comments in the app. We're working hard to remove them as we speak. We do NOT support racism or intolerance of others. Please report comments as you see them, we are actively monitoring reports.