LinkedIn add news curation with ‘trending storylines’

LinkedIn is taking a more forceful approach to news curation. The company today is releasing a “trending storylines” feed that lives alongside your personally curated feeds to showcase news articles and related posts personalized based on your interests and profession.

The experience is like the trending topics Facebook surfaces for its users. The trending storylines are determined by a mix of algorithms and human curation from LinkedIn’s editorial team. When you are in the trending storylines tab, you can also follow new people and topics to improve your primary feed.

LinkedIn

“The editors are the ones starting the conversation. They’re the ones picking the topics that are grounding the storyline,” says Dan Roth, editor in chief at LinkedIn. Those selections are based on a combination of breaking news and topics that are trending on the platform, according to Roth.

Trending storylines get a heavy dose of tech, finance, healthcare

“Initially the storylines we’ll focus on are big business topics of the day, any tech related topics, finance and healthcare,” he says. LinkedIn hopes the move will encourage you to spend more time in the app as you discover more diverse thoughts and content from an expanding sphere of sources.

[ Related: LinkedIn releases major website redesign ]

“The [primary LinkedIn] feed is what you’ve curated for yourself… but you can develop a pretty narrow view of the world,” Roth says. “We think that it’s essential. To be a successful person in this world and to get better at what you do, you have to know what’s going on outside of your narrow focus.”

The new feed of trending stories and topics comes just a couple months after LinkedIn released its most significant redesign to the site since the company was founded 15 years ago. LinkedIn also discussed plans and showed early mock-ups of the new interest-based feed in December.

“Editorial can help expand your world, and then you build the world you want to see,” Roth says. Trending storylines, which are rolling out in the United States in English today, will appear under the trending tab on LinkedIn’s mobile app and on the right-hand side of the desktop homepage. The company says it plans to expand to more countries soon.