Your own personal reporter sending you breaking news alerts straight to your text messages, as well as answering your questions about the news of the day.
This is cool — and yet another effort to help creators monetize their efforts and their content. In this case, Al Boe, who co-founded the @BreakingNews Twitter service and racked up 1.5M+ followers before it was bought by NBC News, has turned to Purple's platform to launch text-based alerts for $5/mo.
One reason why this is worth the price of admission is that it's a two-way street — unlike just turning on notifications for every @alboenews tweet, in this case you get a text with breaking news and then can text back to Al Boe directly to discuss the story. You're basically subscribing to get breaking news texts coupled with mainline access to the reporter.
I've had the privilege of speaking with Rebecca Harris further about Purple. It's a great concept to bring another potential revenue stream to journalists while providing that one-on-one connection news consumers are looking for. Great for community building between journalists and their readers.
Thanks @chrismessina for hunting us! I've worked in the breaking news business for 10 years, and it really is an honor to be on Product Hunt.
We all have our news sources sending out alert after alert to us over various channels, but AlBoeNEWS is different. In addition to our lightning fast breaking news alerts, we strive to be your personal reporter. Have a question about the story we reported on? Send us a text and we will text back. See a news story that you were curious about? Ask about that and we'll look into it.
AlBoeNEWS is striving to be your personal reporter.
@chrismessina I was one of the early users of Twitter in the news space, so I figured out quickly the best ways to gather and quickly verify news on social media. Over the years, I've also developed a substantial number of sources that I can go to for info in a certain area!
@chrismessina We're very often ahead of national and international media sources, and get messages on a daily basis about how we were ahead of everyone else on a particular story. It feels pretty great when that happens. Can't exactly quantify it though. I had left prior to when NBC took over the account, but when they shut it down earlier this year, I immediately saw the need for a new breaking news service and here we are :)