It is, you might say, a complicated moment for news online. There are the efforts to erode the First Amendment, the dominant platforms that aren’t sending traffic like they used to, the complexities of an ever-changing ad business, and on and on the list goes. Maybe most of all, there’s the rise of AI, and platforms that ingest an internet’s worth of news, abstract it away into a mush of semi-true information, and then serve it up to anyone who asks their chatbot what’s new. Into that fray comes Particle, a long-in-the-works new platform from a couple of former Twitter product leaders that is designed to help people find and make sense of the news a little more easily. With a lot of AI.
Particle’s plan is to use AI to do two particularly…