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Sound Off has a lot of features that are subtle upon first look, but can really be quite profound. One such feature is the ability to follow a Developing Story.

What is a Developing Story?

Have you ever gotten a news alert or read an article on a situation that was unfolding right now? This could be anything from a sporting event to an election or a tragic incident such as a large accident or act of violence. What all of these situations have in common is that often the whole story isn’t known at the time of publishing.

Keep checking for updates

The most common “solution” for the Developing Story scenario is to ask the reader to keep coming back to the article and check for updates. This has two side-effects, neither of them are beneficial for us, the readers. First we now have to spend our time and mental energy thinking about how to time our return to the article. Or, more likely, we continue to scroll on social media and refresh our feeds frequently to see if there’s been an update. The second is that time and mental energy that we put in is monetized on behalf of the platform. So we’re putting in the work and not seeing much benefit.

The never ending push notifications

Another solution often employed is to send unsolicited push notifications to your mobile device. If you happen to be interested in following the story the notifications may be welcome … to a point. What if you’ve had your fill for a while? Or what if you were never really that interested to begin with? In those cases the notifications become unwelcome interruptions.

Let us know if you’re interested

Because our business model doesn’t rely on showing you ads, we’re not incentivized to keep  you scrolling indefinitely waiting for an update. Nor do we wish to spam you on the off chance that you might be interested in a Story.

Instead, when you come across a Developing Story from a journalist on Sound Off you can choose to follow that story as told by that specific journalist. In fact you can choose to follow that story from any number of journalistic voices from whom you’d like to hear. We’ll send you a push notification whenever the journalist updates that story on Sound Off. And, most importantly, you can stop following that story at any time.

We think this approach delivers two key benefits. First it gives you your time back? You don’t need to feel FOMO about the stories you care about. And we don’t need to suck your time and attention to keep monetizing you while you wait for updates to a story you care about. Secondly it allows you to opt in and out of push notifications for a story. In this way you now have control over the level of interruption you’re willing to accept.

Subtle but important

At Sound Off we’re constantly thinking about features that both help clean up your information diet and also give you back your time. The benefit of being a subscription platform is that we get to make choices that respect you and your time. Opt-in story level following is just one of many examples of features designed to do just that. If you have ideas about other such features you’d like to see, then sign-up for Sound Off and share your thoughts.