A Halifax news outlet with a twist has entered beta testing.

Inspurious.com is the creation of political scientist Bobbie Macdonald, who started work on it while he was finishing a PhD at Stanford, going on to formally launch the company last fall. Macdonald aims to make online news content more competitive with social media via user experience tweaks designed to remove distractions and barriers to engagement.

To improve his business model’s scaleability, he plans to use AI to adapt some stories for different cities, with a focus on topics involving data or numbers, since articles of that type are particularly well-suited to such modifications.

“(Inspurious) was born out of my own frustration with how I was consuming social media and news,” said Macdonald in an interview Tuesday. “I subscribe to the New York Times, I pay money to the Economist, but it’s so often that I wake up and I’m just scrolling Reddit, and I’m spending time on Instagram, and I’m not getting around to reading the stuff that I like.

“The idea here is to try to … build up knowledge about issues you care about in a way that feels more effortless, like scrolling Instagram.”

News stories on Inspurious are broken into panels of a sentence or two each, reminiscent of X.com posts in their format, with the goal of limiting distractions and preventing information overload. The next panel in a sequence is revealed by the user tapping on their phone screen, and most stories are supplemented with aids like interactive maps, charts and photos. Some articles even quiz readers on their content.

The format consolidates innovations in digital journalism pioneered by outlets like Bloomberg and the Economist, as well as leaning heavily on interactive elements and the segmenting of articles to prevent readers from experiencing information ocerload.

“I was doing my (PhD) research in Kenya on what politicians are up to in the legislature … and I was starting to realize there’s all this really interesting data that’s available to people,” said Macdonald. “They could easily go online and find out what their politicians are doing, how the money is being spent, but it’s not being presented in a way that people can actually digest it.”

Unlike conventional news sites, which typically offer or sell unlimited access to daily, weekly or monthly articles, Inspurious operates on a credit system that limits how many articles users can view.

Readers are assigned a limited number of new credits each day as rewards for engaging with content on the site and can choose what articles to spend their credits on. Macdonald said he is still workshopping the system, but believes it creates a sense of scarcity that incentives readers to pay more attention to the articles they consume.

If the idea works, it could help counteract a longstanding bugbear of the journalism industry: that of readers skimming the first few paragraphs of an article and moving on without looking more closely. Research on exactly how far into a news article a typical consumer reads is mixed, but the average cited by most studies tends to be somewhere around the halfway point.

Macdonald also plans to iterate slightly on the traditional daily, weekly or monthly release of most news outlets by grouping articles into “seasons” — a term borrowed from the video game industry that refers to a publisher releasing new content in blocks that become inaccessible again after a pre-determined period.

The approach reflects his focus on stories that are designed to maintain their relevancy over a longer time period, such as data about the commuting habits of a city’s residents. It also is part of Macdonald’s strategy to slim down the resources needed to produce news. So far, he is Inspurious’s only employee, even though the website covers 17 cities across Canada, with his plan being to use AI and the seasonal model to limit how quickly he must scale staffing.

“If you’ve ever played the video game Fortnite, you have these seasons that last for a few months, and then there’s some new batch of content, and it brings people back to the website,” said Macdonald, referring to a popular shooter game known for innovating on user engagement.

“You would subscribe to a season, get some number of credits per day for that season, and then when the season ends you would possibly decide to (renew) your subscription for a future season.”