IOS 9 was released last week and with it came, at least for US users, the new Apple News app. I tried the app over the weekend and liked its news reading experience. The app is promising and utilitarian. Minimalism works well, especially on mobile.
The arrival of iOS 9 is a milestone for digital news, which is now, according to writer Tim Carmody, an “OS-level utility on mobile devices.” News today is as basic to a phone as music, camera and email.
While Apple News is still only available for US users, anyone using IOS 9 can access it by going to Settings > General > Language and Region and then selecting USA. The device will restart and you will find the red Apple News icon in your homescreen.
Upon opening the app for the first time, it will guide you into choosing news publications from which the app will source its articles.
Apple News builds on the RSS or rich site summary or really simple syndication standard. The company, however, announced that it will soon make available the Apple News Format, which promises publishers the ability to “create stunning content for News.”
News apps have three primary functions: aggregation, recommendation and discovery.
When it comes to aggregation, Feedly trumps Apple News. There isn’t a way to add an RSS feed directly into Apple News, you can only add channels of publishers who signed up with Apple. This is to be expected from a company that extensively screens each app submitted to its App Store.
The advantage with the screening, however, is that publishers will have to give attention to their feeds. Many publishers cut off their feeds after a few paragraphs (taking the rich site summary meaning to heart) to force people to read the actual article in their site. When I encounter such a publisher, I’d either use a tool that will allow me to extract the full article and inject it into my feed or not bother subscribing at all. Hopefully, apps like Apple News will make publishers take the really simple syndication meaning of RSS to heart: it really is a simple way to deliver and distribute content.
Apple News seems to hold the promise of being as good as Flipboard with the key advantage of being built into the iPhone or iPad.
In the recommendation of stories, Apple News does almost as good a job as apps like Zite. Apart from the algorithmic curation of stories where the app learns about your interests based on the stories you read or click and then serves you more of these articles, Apple was reported to have organized a team of human editors for the app.
In the For You section of Apple News, the app displays stories “collected based on your likes and interests.” The listing I got when I opened it Sunday morning included an Ars Technica article on gaming in Linux, a re/code story on the ad blocking capability in iOS 9 (a hot issue among publishers), two stories on Pope Francis (one that he was now in Cuba and the other by MacRumors that his visit could delay iPhone 6s deliveries—talk about niche publishing). It had stories on
Kylie Jenner being attacked at a concert (insert eyes rolling emoji here), a short article on the news aggregation app Nuzzel and stories on Salesforce.com, Microsoft Surface Pro, virtual AI assistants and “the first video of BlackBerry’s Android phone in action.”
Zite, a longtime favorite news app, showed a more interesting selection: a TechCrunch story on health care startups and funding, an Atlantic roundup of stories, a blog post by Jeff Jarvis on journalism innovations, a must-read story by Dave Winer on “unwanted advertising,” and a The Next Web story on Facebook’s take on the virtual assistant.
Zite offered the better selection for me because it has long been tracking the things I’ve been reading. Apple’s selection will improve as I use it more for reading news stories.
When it comes to discovery, Nuzzel does better at alerting me to interesting and breaking news stories. Nuzzel taps into your social connections on Facebook and Twitter to display top stories based on the number of shares by friends and contacts. But, it is still early days for Apple News and one expects it to improve on this aspect in the coming weeks.
Overall, Apple News is a solid release, an app that has the potential to displace other news applications largely because it is pre-installed into iOS devices.
TECH AND JOURNALISM. This week is Cebu Press Freedom Week and throughout it will be scheduled various fora and activities. On Friday, our startup, InnoPub Media, in collaboration with Smart Communications, Inc. and PLDT, will be holding the 2nd New Media Meetup.
This year’s meetup will focus on the use of mobile phones for news coverage and basic HTML/CSS and coding literacy for journalists. The meetup is free but slots are very limited. We’re also giving away cool prizes and those who attend this session will be prioritized in upcoming sessions on building mobile apps and setting up news websites. To sign up, go to www.facebook.com/InnoPub.
(max@limpag.com)