By Jason Holtman, SVP of Product, SmartNews

I come from the world of video games, which is obsessed with immersion and focus. Like movies, video games have detail, craft, and form that aim to capture players’ attention and continuously reward them for it. Frankly, I didn’t expect too many parallels between gaming and the news and information industry ? you don’t, of course, “play the news.” But, I found myself coming back to this idea and experience of paying attention. In today’s information landscape, being present and paying attention while reading the news ? really reading it ? might be the most radical act you can perform.

When we started building NewsArc at SmartNews, we were trying to find a different footing for the news. For a while now, news consumption has become something we react to, rather than something we engage with. It’s hard to pay attention when you find yourself just constantly reacting, like a pool ball caroming out of powerful break shots. That out-of-control reactiveness and noise have flattened the experience of the news, making it a means to elicit outrage, fear, anger, and conflict. Nobody can (or wants to) pay attention to that.

So we set out to deliver the news in a way that invites attention, encourages exploration, and rewards curiosity.

Sunday mornings come to mind. That moment when you sit with coffee and a magazine, or maybe your favorite paper, at home or out-and-about, and the world slows just enough for reflection. You don’t flip pages out of habit ? you read. You pause. You consider. That’s not just nostalgia. It’s a sensory and intellectual experience, one that leaves you more grounded than you were before.

Similarly, I love music. When I listen to a great album, I really sit with it, I feel its shape, and let it pull me in. I don’t “skim the headlines” when I queue up Future Nostalgia, The Dark Side of the Moon, F-1 Trillion, or OK Computer. Instead, I pay attention to the transitions, the lyrics that don’t resolve cleanly, a set of shakers that only weave in at the chorus, and the buried sounds and asides that reward a second or third listen. The best journalism works the same way: it carries a structure, a tempo, and an emotional weight you can only catch if you're present. Those are also the things that make us want to share and talk and build community ? we’re not just passing along information. We’re making and enjoying an experience.

Those types of experiences led us to build a technology platform called Arc, which is powered in part by large language models and systems that help us collect and present content from our partners based on editorial judgment, narrative sense, and depth of coverage. Behind the scenes, the Arc platform uses LLMs not to addict but to interpret ? to find patterns in the noise, to elevate substance over spectacle. That’s a hard promise in an era of feeds optimized for that dopamine pool table.

We believe NewsArc is going to earn your attention ? hopefully, it will feel like you are reading your most trusted newspaper or favorite magazine, and discovering articles that change your mind and start conversations. Something worth paying attention to.