21 January 2019

Columbia Journalism Review: “Apple News UK editors rely on six outlets for 75 percent of Top Stories”

Over three-quarters of all articles selected for the Top Stories section came from Sky News, BBC News, ESI Media stablemates the Evening Standard and The Independent, The Telegraph, and The Sun (77 percent combined). Two major broadcasters—BBC News and Sky News—consistently accounted for around 40 percent, or two out of every five, of articles featured; and The London Evening Standard was the third most featured publication in every analysis, averaging 11 percent of all articles, meaning that just three outlets—Sky News, BBC News, and the Evening Standard—consistently accounted for over half of all recommendations in Top Stories.

This habit—and the choice of outlets—supports an earlier Tow analysis of recommendations made by Apple News UK’s editors on @AppleNewsUK’s Twitter feed, which showed a tendency to prioritize a small group of major publishers.

Pete Brown

Interesting – and worrying – statistic. While Google, Facebook and Twitter all rely on algorithms to deliver ‘relevant’ news content to users – with the significant downside of spreading manipulation and hoaxes with unmatched speed – Apple has taken the opposite approach of having human editors manually curate news content. But this story highlights some of the downsides of this approach: compared to algorithms, humans simply cannot process the huge amount of news articles published online, so the readers are served a restricted number of ‘trusted’ sources, probably missing out on many relevant news because smaller local publishers aren’t ‘big enough’ to attract Apple’s attention.

Further down the page, we find another reason for the sparse offering: Apple is pushing its own native format to publishers, no doubt trying to establish another platform with lock-in effects. Considering the meager incomes generated by Apple News and the fact that many publications already use Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant Articles, it’s not surprising most publishers have decided against using yet another format for their stories.

To stand a chance of being included in Apple News’ Top Stories section, and enjoy the avalanche of traffic that that privilege has proven to deliver, publishers must use ANF instead of directing readers back to their own websites.

Yet Apple’s failure to make this proposition financially viable for cash-strapped publishers has negative ramifications for its own, much-trumpeted, human-led news curation.

Apple’s editors are not sifting through the ‘best’ coverage posted to Apple News; they are sifting through the best coverage published in Apple News Format—a format that many outlets, big and small, have decided to shun. The Guardian and The Mirror, two major outlets that Apple News’ UK editors frequently promoted on Twitter before they stopped publishing in ANF, maintain active Apple News channels—they just don’t publish in the platform’s native format anymore. They never appear in Top Stories.

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