What is News Rush?

News Rush is a simple tool that allows the audience to speed-read a word by word summary of current events. The latest headlines are pulled in from BBC Newsbeat and presented rapidly one word at a time, with links to the relevant stories presented at the end of the experience. This makes News Rush both an entertaining news consumption format and a useful discovery tool.

What was the catalyst for News Rush?

The concept came out of a general development session within the team. We wanted to try and re-format existing BBC content in a fun and playful way.

Newsbeat does great work at creating news for a young audience - we wanted to see if we could take that further and use a playful digital idea to try out new approaches to displaying and leading people to that content.

Where do you go from here?

We wait to see what the audience thinks - my hope is that this becomes a re-usable tool, or the inspiration for other ways we can present existing content in interesting new ways.

Are there any issues with such a fast visual format?

We hope this limited pilot will help us answer that question – how exactly do people react to content surfaced in this way?

We aim to collect feedback on how users react to the presentation and speed of the text, and hope that as many people as possible do enjoy it.

We are however using content direct from the BBC Newsbeat site which still provides a fully accessible version of that information for anyone that has issues using the tool.