Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy; this article explores reading news through mobile applications as a supportive tool for this purpose. Fifteen language learners as participants of the experimental group used two popular news applications on their mobile phones for reading as a pre-task activity that made them outperform their counterparts in the control group in terms of using facts in essays. No significant difference, however, was observed in the overall writing ability of two groups despite considerable progress of the variable content in the experimental group’s favor.