Headline

A news app for Gen-Z: quick, unbiased, community-oriented.

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What it does

In the fast scrolling world, no one has time to read larger paragraphs and understand long-winded news articles. With Headline, you can get the most headlines of the news, and if you are interested in a specific article, you can open and read the gist of it. You can also see if the article is biased, vote on it and even comment your thoughts about it.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend and Django for the backend. To scrape web pages, we used Python’s Selenium and BeautifulSoup packages to extract headlines and relevant information from sites such as the New York Times and Google News. We then performed a sentiment analysis on the titles of articles using Google Cloud’s Natural Language API; this allowed us to compute a score to label how biased the article title was.

Challenges we ran into

We all took on new challenges for this project and tried something new. The first big challenge was understanding how React works, with the second big challenge understanding how to scrape the headlines from news pages. The entire group was dealing with technologies and frameworks we had not worked with before, so familiarizing ourselves and initializing our environments was also a big challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We chose to use languages, frameworks, and APIs that none of us had any experience with. This led to many challenges throughout the process and we are proud that we were able to overcome them as a team. Seeing our ideas come to life was really exciting!

What we learned

Technically, we have acquired a lot of knowledge in UI/UX, React, Django, and Google APIs but one of the strongest things we have learned was communication and adaptation to situations to work. One of our teammates is in a different timezone but we collaborated together to solve all issues by helping each other.

What's next for Headline

We see Headline as a visionary project. Even though we had this idea at our first hackathon, we want to take the project seriously and implement all the features we have in our original design. We hope that Headline can become the news app for the younger generation.

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