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posted by n1 on Thursday June 11 2015, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the everything-is-awesome dept.

So Apple's got its very own newsreader app, aptly called News. It will come natively installed on its iOS 9 mobile operating system this fall. This adds to the list of third parties that publishers have come to rely upon to distribute their stories. Apple says one of the most appealing things about News is stories will look and feel distinctive, as if they're coming directly from publishers' own sites, creating a sense of independent control over their own content.

And yet.

As with its Podcasts app, iTunes, and the App Store, News is Apple's app, which means Apple is the ultimate arbiter of what appears on it. Shortly after announcing News, the company released a publishing guide. So far, it seems targeted largely at developers testing the app and figuring out how to publish on it ahead of its official release. But the guide does say "channels" will need to be approved by Apple, meaning Apple will determine to some extent what is or is not allowed on News.

And this matters at a time when a few prominent tech companies are becoming the stewards of the news millions of people see, read, watch, and experience each day. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are the entry point for many readers checking the news daily—not to mention Google News. And each has its own standards for what it will and will not allow to appear. Now that Apple has committed to becoming a publisher, another tech giant will be mediating the news that the public consumes. This means the standards Apple chooses to follow will have a direct impact on what millions of readers see—or don't see.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-news-app-gives-power-decide-whats-news/


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  • (Score: 1) by darkengine on Friday June 12 2015, @12:20AM

    by darkengine (5287) on Friday June 12 2015, @12:20AM (#195193) Homepage

    This is the main reason I'm sad about the demise of Google Reader and RSS. Everyone I know use aggregators like Reddit, Hacker News, this website, etc, rather than aggregating news from many sources themselves via RSS. RSS protected from any power who wished to control what news gets seen and what didn't. Sadly, it seems like almost nobody uses it anymore.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 12 2015, @12:23AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 12 2015, @12:23AM (#195195) Journal

    As long as the sites themselves don't remove their own RSS feeds (forcing you to find some third party feed for the site), I think it's fine.

    I use an RSS extension. Mozilla users can use Live Bookmarks.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 1) by darkengine on Friday June 12 2015, @12:32AM

      by darkengine (5287) on Friday June 12 2015, @12:32AM (#195199) Homepage

      The problem I've found is that many sites nowadays don't bother to maintain their RSS feeds. Most of the time, the full article is not present, and often, only the title and a link are present, and sometimes they are broken entirely following a site upgrade.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday June 12 2015, @12:58AM

    by Marand (1081) on Friday June 12 2015, @12:58AM (#195204) Journal

    This is the main reason I'm sad about the demise of Google Reader and RSS.

    Rumours of RSS' demise have been greatly exagerrated.

    I've used it for years, and still do now, to follow sites. If a site doesn't provide a feed I request one be added, or I find a similar site that already has one. It saves my time and their bandwidth because I don't have to load the site just to see there's nothing interesting to me. Unlike aggregator sites, RSS doesn't have to be super popular to be useful. Site puts a feed up and can generally forget about it afterward, benefitting users and admins alike for low effort.

    Never used Google Reader, though. Didn't even know it existed until the shutdown announcement. Plenty of alternatives around that won't vanish one day, so no reason to mourn the loss of yet another google data-harvesting platform.

  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday June 13 2015, @12:58AM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Saturday June 13 2015, @12:58AM (#195584)

    I use it every day. There's a nice iOS reader called Newsstand.