Apple's aptly named newsreader, Apple News, is expanding its digital walls to embrace the world beyond the biggest news publishers. The company is announcing new tools today so any creator can design stories for a tailored News experience. Smaller, independent publishers will now be able to publish their stories on News with new web-based tools alongside bigger names like The Atlantic and, full disclosure, WIRED.
For Apple, this is a somewhat expected shift. The company first launched News last fall with several partners from major print and digital publishers with custom pages. As of January, News featured 100 different publications ranging from big ones like CNN to smaller ones like The Awl. But while Apple touts an immersive experience where News pages can look authentically like those from a specific publisher, not every organization has the means to create customized pages for News, opting instead for a more RSS-like feed.
Readers today, however, look far beyond a traditional newsstand when browsing what's happening around the world. To keep up with those demands, Apple has to ensure its digital newsstand includes more than just the big names. Now Apple hopes anyone who makes stuff on the Internet (and wants to be on News) will be able to make their own stylized pages featuring, say, customized fonts and embedded visuals with tools to convert pages to the so-called Apple News Format. To what extent Apple will be monitoring who signs up to publish on the site (and what publishers choose to publish) remains to be seen.
Apple is also announcing a new analytics dashboard today, so that publishers who do decide to share their stories in News can get a better picture of who has viewed those stories. While Apple said in October that nearly 40 million people have used News, publishers have expressed frustration around the user experience and lack of data shared with them so far. At times, news organizations have been able to download digital files to access some data about stories and channels. For media companies, analytics are crucial, as data is used to determine the size of a reader base, who stories reach, and how they reach them—all of which helps those publishers sell ads.
In recent years, publishers have come to terms with sharing their stories across distributed platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, but access to data about readers remains crucial. Facebook's Instant Articles allows publishers to track analytics with popular services like comScore and Omniture. Snapchat, meanwhile, touts access to a coveted demographic: millennials and teens. With its new AMP project, Google has partnered with services to ensure that news publishers get the data they need. Now Apple has learned and will be sharing more detailed analytics in a dashboard-like format to appease publishers. The company expects to publish data from comScore beginning in the spring. After all, if Apple News operates like a black box, the very publishers it needs will have little use for it themselves.
