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LinkedIn tries to make a smarter news feed with 'trending storylines'

LinkedIn is trying to make its home feed more useful.

The professional network introduced a new feature Wednesday called "trending storylines," which surfaces a personalized feed of news stories based on topics you're likely to be interested in. 

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Rolling out across LinkedIn's apps and website in the U.S now, the feature uses a combination of human editors and algorithms to curate feeds based on topics that are trending in the news and among different groups. These feeds are then personalized to each users' tastes so an engineer, for instance, may see stories about new research in their field while someone in finance may see news about the markets. 

Inside of each "storyline" is a collection of news stories as well as relevant posts from LinkedIn influencers and people you're connected with. Each storyline is also assigned its own hashtag so anyone can chime in with their own post related to a given storyline. 

Image: LinkedIn

Soon, the feature will also encompass topic-based feeds so users can follow specific interests more closely, like artificial intelligence or the trucking industry.

The goal of all this, says LinkedIn's VP of Product Tomer Cohen, is to provide a range of "diverse perspectives" for any given topic that someone may be interested in.

"Our mission is to get them to discover and discuss those new ideas and perspectives so they can be more productive."

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