Apple today unveiled an all-new News app for delivering a news reading experience on any mobile device. Available with iOS 9 this fall for iPhone and iPad, News combines the visually rich layout of a magazine with the immediacy and customization of digital media. News follows over a million topics and pulls relevant stories based on your specific interests that can be easily shared or saved for later — without compromising your privacy. News is powered by the new custom-designed Apple News Format, a digital publishing format that allows publishers to create beautiful layouts.
“News seamlessly delivers the articles you want to read in a beautiful and uncluttered format, while respecting your privacy, because Apple doesn’t share your personal data,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a statement. “We already have nearly 20 publishers representing more than 50 titles joining us, including Condé Nast, ESPN, The New York Times, Hearst, Time Inc., CNN and Bloomberg.”
News conveniently collects all the stories you want to read in one place, in a customized newsfeed called For You. Readers can see the publisher channels and topics they’re following in Favorites, and to discover new content, Explore makes great suggestions based on what you’ve already read. The more you read, the more personalized the News app becomes, refining the selection of stories delivered to your iPhone or iPad.
Apple News Format allows publishers to create stories that look beautiful and take advantage of the full power of iOS. Content can include photos and galleries, audio, video, maps and rich interactions such as parallax and animation. When publishers create their stories for News, content comes alive with custom fonts and intuitive Multi-Touch gestures. Apple News Format automatically customizes the layout for each screen size, so News content looks great on both iPhone and iPad.
“Condé Nast’s premium content deserves a premium mobile experience and the News app delivers that,” said Bob Sauerberg, President of Condé Nast, in a statement. “News offers an environment that combines the rich, immersive design of our photography, artwork and editorial expertise with the interactivity and dynamism of digital media — it’s stunning.”
“ESPN fans are incredibly engaged in the way they consume our content, so the more vibrant experience we can offer, the happier they’ll be,” said John Skipper, President of ESPN Inc. and Co-Chairman of Disney Media Networks, in a statement. “We’ve seen incredible success with our ESPN apps on iOS, and News is only going to make a richer, more personal experience for our readers so they can stay up-to-date on the sports news that matters to them.”
Publishers interested in signing up can visit www.icloud.com/newspublisher with additional publishing tools available later this year. iOS 9 will be available this fall as a free software update for iPhone 4s and later, iPod touch 5th generation, iPad 2 and later, iPad mini and later. Features are subject to change. Some features may not be available in all regions or all languages.
Source: Apple Inc.
Flipboard without the user curation.
Available only in a few countries… Same with Apple Pay, HBO, etc. Odly, Apple is becoming more and more regional.
I would love to know the price for that. Because all that beauty and news “for you” means at least processing power, and bandwidth. But will this mean in-article ads and click-bait? Or, read the full article with your subscription like ft.com? “Stuff” like that doesn’t come for free, never has, never will. There is a cost point – and making money/profit is good (incentivizes anyone to produce more).
In addition, and unless we hear this from Apple, I can only speculate: How exactly does this selection process work? Will this be decided by a person (always a bad idea), an algorithm, multiple user’s preferences (profiling of sorts)? Reminds me of iTunes Genius… I hope they got it right for the News.
And what about those partnered companies. Is that content featured? I don’t care about FoxNews MSNBC NYT or WSJ as my source of news… too polarized, like the fast food of news.
And nope, no one cares THAT much if anything about beauty and content. Zap2It wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for anything-goes content. Created to sell ad-space.
Nothing wrong with monetization, but For [Expletive]’s Sake, I hate being lied to that it’s all about the beauty, planet, children, or anything else but you keeping the lights on (first and foremost).
You must have never used Zite which is also a great free custom web amalgamator.
Aggregator.💥
blame it on news companies… well it’s better than digital magazines-newspapers.
Ooh, a news app! How exciting!
News is the new Zite.💥😱😜🎉
1. The transitions and animations looked great
2. Hopefully they will include reader comments. Sometimes, I learn more from the comment section than from the article. Plus, some comments are laugh, riot hilarious and provide great comedic relief.
The woman who presented the Apple Pay program should find someone else to do the presentation, since she had the personality of a brick.
Wasn’t there someone who wrote an article about the dangers of personalizing news too much? The idea is that you will end up getting news that reflect your own opinions and filtering out news that doesn’t fit the ‘profile’ your news app builds about you, thus more easily reinforcing your biases.