Particle: Building a user-focused AI news experience 

Hi Sara, let’s start at the beginning: Why did you start Particle?

My Co-Founder, Marcel Molina, and I worked together at Twitter for many years, so we’ve always been at the intersection of what’s happening in the news media and connecting people to that.

Toward the end of 2022, we were both looking for our next challenge. It was also around the time that ChatGPT came out, and we started thinking about what we could do with this new “superpower” that LLMs give us. How could it help us make sense of what’s going on and reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by trying to keep up with the news? That’s where Particle’s mission came from.

We like to say that Particle lets you understand more, faster. That really captures the experience that we’re trying to give users. We’ve found that since news has come online, the user experience has diminished. People either only get their news from one perspective, look on social media and get very skewed perspectives, or give up entirely. We wanted to tackle that problem.

When you’re thinking of your target audience, who are you thinking of? Young people, old people? News lovers, casual news consumers?  

Our dream is all of the above! Since we just launched in November, we’ve been targeting a couple of key kinds of users. One of them is the news junkie. These are the people who are very much into the news and like the way Particle aggregates everything and guides them through every single detail that they want in the story.

But because Particle does that in such a simple way, the other group we are targeting – and with whom our product really resonates – is people who just want to understand what’s going on or be kept more casually informed about the day-to-day news. These are the people who just want the TL;DR because they don’t have time in earnest to fit news into their day.

We’re finding that Particle is resonating with both of those kinds of groups. We’re working from a product perspective to really reach everyone in between as well.

News publishers publish different types of content (e.g., opinion pieces, sports stories, live updates). How do you weigh different types of content in your summaries?

One Particle story is really a cluster of a number of articles about the same story for that day. The way they are weighed in your home feed is primarily driven by your interests. So, if you are more interested in politics versus sports, that is how the topics are weighted in your main feed.

Within the story itself, we use a few heuristics to generate the summary to make sure that it’s as fresh as possible and incorporates any new information that may have been recently reported. So, a cluster itself may evolve over time if new information becomes available. We will weigh information that is more recent if that is the case.

There are other heuristics that we use to try to make sure that the summary is as accurate and as fresh as possible. It’s something that we think about a lot and something that we’re also actively developing to improve.

Sometimes stories have so many different parts to them and a single summary, although it might help you get caught up the first time, isn’t necessarily going to help you understand key developments that are happening over time, especially if there are many of them. The LA wildfires, for example, is a story that has so many different parts to it: There’s the discussion of what’s going on with the government, the homes and the people that were lost, and the environmental factors. We’re actively working on teasing out those different parts of a story. And again, we want to summarize them so that you can catch up quickly and have a map of how to go deeper if you want to. 

How do you make sure that branding remains a part of what you offer in Particle? 

We totally understand and respect that branding is important. It’s something we want to highlight, not diminish. The source articles for a Particle story are very prominently placed underneath the summary with the publisher’s branding, their name, the author’s byline, and the author’s headshot.

You can also follow publishers and authors in the app. This affects your experience in a couple of ways. One is, if you’re following a specific publisher or author and their piece was used as part of the summary, they will be listed first in the list of articles. So, your favorites will always rise to the top. You can also sign up for push notifications for specific authors. Whenever they publish, you get a push notification and that will take you directly to their website.

We want to work with publishers and authors to figure out even more ways to highlight them. We have several partner publishers where this is an ongoing conversation, and we’re really interested in how we can lean into it further.

How do Particle’s partnerships with publishers work? 

Publisher partnerships are beneficial in a few ways. One is that we get to have a direct line of collaboration for, not only how we build the product, but anything that we can do to help them on their side.

For some publishers, we’re able to bring their content into an in-app reading experience on Particle. If you open a Particle story and see one or more of the articles has a little gold icon, that means if you tap on that story, you’ll have a native in-app reading experience.

You launched three months ago in November. How has the traction been? 

We had a private beta for several months, and deciding when to launch can feel like both a very deliberate but also a very arbitrary decision. I think the team was really excited to just get it out there so that we can continue to build without the pressure of not having launched.

We’re seeing growth and the qualitative feedback that we’ve gotten has been very positive. But this is step one. We have so much to do. The team is really focused on product development. We have so many things that we are excited to bring over the next few quarters in 2025.

Have you received any surprising or unexpected feedback? 

Something that we’ve observed that, maybe if you don’t work in news might be surprising, is that on Saturdays and Sundays, it’s primarily sports news. We’ve been thinking about how we can improve the experience on those days if you’re not interested in sports.

Another surprising thing is that for a lot of people, it’s a breath of fresh air in terms to have a news app that really feels like it is designed for the user. We’re really interested in the medium and long-term on how we align incentives between the users, publishers, and journalists. How can we provide an experience that aligns incentives between all three because right now it’s like “pick two,” and oftentimes it’s the reader that gets left behind. Their experience trying to read, catch up, and understand what’s going on is not great. We’re striving to align incentives and give everyone a great experience.

Earlier last year, two news media startups, The Messenger (non-partisan news service) and Artifact (AI-driven news personalization), shut down. What’s your plan for monetization?  

It’s really early days. It is something that we’re thinking about, but we don’t yet have plans to share. I think there are a lot of interesting opportunities. I have a lot of respect for Artifact and what they were aiming to do and, from a user experience perspective, it is very similar to what our mission is. They started a couple of years before AI really took off and we had the advantage of already having it natively built into our platform. What all these apps and products show is that there is this need that users are still looking for, an experience that matches their lives and where they are. We’re going to continue to strive towards that.

To wrap things up, is there anything you’d wished we’d discuss or that you’d like to say?  

I’ll just reiterate that Particle just launched a few months ago. We’re really listening to everyone’s feedback and iterating on the product. We have so many awesome things coming this year. I’m really excited about it all. We are continuing to focus on our relationships with publishers as well. So, any publisher that would like to chat with us, we are embracing those conversations!

This interview was edited for clarity. A special thanks to Sara for taking the time to chat with us.