There was a time that I am starting to forget about, when I could read the newspaper at my own pace without worrying about jobs or other responsibilities. I was a high school student and I really enjoyed reading the newspaper every single day. Back then my days used to start with the smell of fresh ink from the morning newspaper. Now things have completely changed, now there are days when I don’t even remove rubber band from the rolled up newspaper. I try to take it to work in my bag, but it stays there unread all day long.
With very little time in our grown up lives to pay attention to daily news, we have to find other means to stay acquainted with everyday news. Apart from watching TV in the lunch time and listening to a radio news station during the commuting, you can also use an extension called Newsprompt in the Chrome web browser.
What this extension does is that it changes the contents of any new tab you open and displays the latest news aggregated from various sources like the Fox news, CNN, BBC, Reuters, MSN, Rollingstone, USA Today and so on – the extension claims to scan over one thousand such news sources. For each news, it displays a thumbnail picture, headline and a brief summary – you can click on the thumbnail to open the full article on the source website.
Other than the latest news from all over the world, it also displays the trending news in a different section. All these news coming from various sources is updated every few minutes (as the extension site claims), so that you can see the very recent news articles as they are happening around the globe. Besides, there is always the Yahoo! search embedded in the new tab page for your basic internet searching needs.
The extension does not offer anything in terms of customization or settings. In fact, it does not even have any settings page. So you cannot really control what type of news you would like to see in the new tab page. Why it installs an icon in the Chrome’s toolbar remains a mystery – the icon does not really do anything productive.
You can get the Newsprompt extension for Chrome from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newsprompt-breaking-news/gcajgpbafhkbkdpbaaipjoiajnangjhp.