About Hark

Why we built it

I’m Cooper Han, a student-athlete at Northwestern with a deep interest in startups. The inspiration for Hark actually originally belonged to my dad: he spent 30 to 45 minutes every morning reading email newsletters, and then another 30 to 45 walking the dog. One day he handed me the observation as a challenge: if the newsletters could be read aloud, both could happen at once. “Why don’t you build that?” So I did. Hark became my summer of 2026 with hundreds of hours of building, testing, and rebuilding.

So I built Hark around a five-minute habit instead of a thirty-minute chore. Rather than the daily pressure to sit and read for half an hour or more, you listen for five minutes on a walk, a commute, or over coffee. You get most of your morning back and still keep up. That small, repeatable habit is the whole point: you stay more current, you walk into any conversation ready, and you feel a little smarter every single day.

The idea: never hand an app your inbox

Every other newsletter reader asks you to connect your email, a standing grant to read your entire mailbox. We took the opposite approach. Your personal inbox is never involved at all. Hark subscribes, on your behalf, to only the editorially curated newsletters you choose, at a private Hark address that's yours alone. Remove any newsletter anytime in Settings, and it's gone. That constraint shapes everything else we do.

How your briefing is made

When your selected newsletters arrive, we start processing the audio newscast and also give you a personal, simple inbox where you can access and read the original newsletters anytime. We then synthesize the day's stories into a short spoken script, always with a link back to the original source, and read it in a natural voice. We summarize and point you to the source. We never reproduce a newsletter in full, and we never train models on your content.

A briefing is a convenience, not a replacement for the original reporting, and never professional financial, medical, or legal advice. The sources are always one tap away, and we say so on every episode.

How we choose the newsletters we recommend

Our newsletter guides are hand-checked. For each one we include, we confirm it's currently publishing, note whether it's free or paid, and link straight to the official signup. We don't take payment for placement, we don't reproduce anyone's content, and where a price or detail is uncertain we say so rather than guess. When something changes, we update the page and its date.

Who we are

Hark is an independent product built by a small team. We're small on purpose: the whole design principle is to hold as little of your data as possible, for as short a time as possible. The best way to reach us about anything, including corrections, is the letters desk at scoop@hark.news. Read more about how we handle data in our Privacy Policy.