The Fig City News app puts Newton’s news, events, meetings, weather, and restaurants on your phone. It is free for iPhone and iPad on the App Store and for Android on Google Play. There are no ads, no accounts, and no paywall.
The Today screen
Open the app and the Today screen shows your day at a glance: current weather in a plain sentence, top stories with a marker on anything published in the last 24 hours, today’s community events, government meetings for the week ahead, and quick links to the restaurant directory and Newton 311. Every card can be reordered or hidden in Settings, so the screen shows what you care about.
Everything Fig City News publishes is on figcitynews.com, and that is not changing. The app draws its articles live from the same system that runs the website, so a story appears in the app the moment it is published. What the app adds is what a website cannot do:
- Home screen widgets with headlines, events, meetings, and weather
- Notifications you choose, from a daily morning briefing to breaking news
- Your news read aloud, in the car or on a walk
- Reminders for community events and city meetings
- A direct line to Newton 311 for reporting potholes and other issues
Listen on the go
Fig City News publishes an audio edition of nearly every article. The Podcasts tab collects them all: tap Play All to turn the day’s news into a playlist, with a mini player that follows you around the app. You can also have any single article read aloud with the Listen button, with a choice of six voices and four speeds. Playback continues in the background and works with lock screen and CarPlay controls.
News, searchable
The News tab carries the full Fig City News feed and searches the archive as you type. Articles open in a clean reading view with the photos, captions, and links intact, and any article can be shared with the standard share sheet.
Newton restaurants
The Food tab opens with search across the Fig City News restaurant directory, which tracks more than 180 Newton places to eat across the city’s 13 villages. Filter by village, cuisine, or favorites, or sort by what is nearby. The directory includes each restaurant’s regular weekly hours, powering an Open now filter that shows what is serving at this moment (holiday closures and special hours are not reflected). On iPhone, a map view shows what is around you. The Spin button picks a restaurant at random for the undecided.
My Local Eats is a checklist of Newton’s locally owned restaurants: check off the ones you have tried and share your tally with friends. Which Newton resident has dined at the most local spots? Send your My Local Eats share image to [email protected] and we will see who is in the lead.
Alerts on your terms
The app offers seven optional notifications, each with its own switch in Settings:
- Morning Briefing (daily, 7AM): weather, the top headline, and what is happening today
- Evening forecast (daily, 8PM): tomorrow’s weather, with a heads-up when rain is likely
- Government meetings (Monday, 8AM): the week’s city meetings
- Newsletter reminder (Wednesday, 8AM)
- Community events (Thursday, 8AM)
- Trending stories (Friday, 8AM)
- Breaking news, as it happens
Nothing is sent unless you turn it on.
Widgets, Siri, and weather
Five home screen widgets are available on both platforms: latest stories, trending stories, community events, government meetings, and Newton weather. On iPhone, Siri can read Newton headlines, weather, trending stories, and events on request. The weather section offers hourly and 7-day forecasts for Newton, with no ads and nothing to scroll past.
Newton 311
The 311 tab connects directly to the City of Newton’s service request system, so reporting a pothole, a missed trash pickup, or a downed limb is two taps away.
Free, and made in Newton
The app was created in 2023 by Newton developer Jared Prior and has been steadily expanded since. It is free, with no account required. If you find it useful, please rate it in the App Store or on Google Play, send feedback from the app’s Support card or the feedback form, and consider supporting Fig City News, the all-volunteer nonprofit newsroom behind it.