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/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Thursday June 11 2015, @11:29PM
Social media which learns what you want to hear ends up showing that to you. It forms communities where none would otherwise exist. This is how the anti-vaccine movements spread, and why it's so difficult to reach them with reality. Those stories literally do not appear to them. Same goes for either flavor of "political party" here in the USA you want to convince yourself is somehow different from the other. Truth and reality has no place in these discussions.
(Before you go there - yes, I am aware of and vote 3rd party whenever possible; if not possible I vote against all incumbents)
Even a subtle, persistent bias in what gets shown to people has insidious effects. Just look at branding and advertising.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Friday June 12 2015, @12:55AM
Uhh, no sir. You can't reach them with reality, because you can't prove it really is. Until you solve the problem with integrity and ethics in the medical community, you will constantly find the "truth" and "reality" not sticking to these "people" regardless of source. Do you really think just because a biased study, bought and paid for by pharmaceuticals, is convincing anyone when seen in the major news channels? How can they when they also report that the Big Pharma gets caught killing people, and then let off by the FDA with a Too-Big-To-Fail cop out on why they are not rightfully destroyed in accordance with established law. You try and fight claims against vaccines, when the real battle is for the hearts and minds of these people. Convincing them of the science is actually easy, convincing them that the corporations are truly interested in performing the science solely for their medical benefit is practically impossible given the current environment of endemic corruption.
Before you claim your "shit doesn't stink", really make sure it doesn't stink.
Now, if you used climate change and global warming, you still come back to a problem of trust. It's not that the reality of climate change can't sink in, it's that there isn't enough trust in the system. Even here, we discuss the failings of the scientific community, problems with metrics, integrity and submission standards of scientific journals, proper use of statistics, etc. On a sophisticated and informed level we are skeptics of ourselves, and extremely cognizant of the penchant for corrupt and biased science.
The news is no different, and in fact, far worse for its skepticism. There are no scientists, and the well trained English majors are dying off. The publishing channels are owned by old men, who are openly and admittedly engaged in buying politicians, presidencies, etc. So what you end up with is openly pandered news controlled by corrupt men, and delivered in increasingly poorly written articles. Yeah, I wouldn't be swayed too much by what I read there either.
So while I might agree that Social Media is *even worse* for pandering to its audience members, don't blame the audience for not trusting the sources. They know they are being lied to most of the time, and most lack the sophistication or will to do anything about it. Wherever they turn, they are relying on somebody else to bring them the news, interpret what is going on, and explain it to them. In short, they're fucked. Where do you expect them to go for the "truth" and "reality" you wish them to be exposed to?
That's the truly sad part, as the only trustworthy people in their minds, are themselves. I find it reasonable that an anti-vac position can go viral, even when uninformed, as that independent publisher has far more trust and integrity than the incumbents. Truly, it's easier to believe that random poster on Social Media, then it is a poorly written article on CNN.com. This is your battle, not raving about how they're just too stupid to listen.
As for me and my news, it's fairly simple - SoylentNews . I know and understand the bias around here, and deep down, I don't believe a fucking thing anyone says in TFA till I see it real in reality around me. Until then, it's grouped in with the lies I'm fed from every direction on the Internet, with nearly all of these directions (this place being an exception) being down on their knees blowing those really in charge of the publishing. Standard operating procedure for corporations, and it's always corporations bringing the news with a rich man at the top making the decisions in a selfish fashion.
Apple's Walled Garden having a policy they decide what the truth and reality is that get's reported? I'm utterly and completely shocked . It's almost as if the place is a large container where free thought and expressions of ideas are restricted? As if, it's in accordance with the published ideas and concepts of the founder? Nah, that would be trolling Apple right? ;)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @11:28AM
Its very well proven that the benefits far outweigh the risks. So then what's the complaint? That they aren't 100% perfectly effective and completely harmless? You live in reality, nothing is perfect and nothing is harmless, thats why we weight things on a scale of "risk vs benefit". If not being 100% absolutely safe and effective is a requirement, then you will be too paralyzed by fear to do literally anything - you cannot take any kind of medicine at all, nor can you drink anything (liquids such as water can kill you in many different ways, not safe at all!), nor eat anything (food and stuff in food can kill you too!), nor use any kind of machinery or tool, nor even go outside; even staying inside is unsafe! The benefits for everything listed are great enough that they outweigh the risks - regardless of how potentially harmful they are, the benefits are enough to make it worth the risk. Vaccines are the same, the benefits of being vaccinated and living in a vaccinated society far outweigh the risks inherent in the vaccinations themselves.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday June 17 2015, @12:09AM
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
I can accept the risks. Guess what? You're going to die. Going to happen my friend. Yeah, there are "risks" to walking around, breathing, the human condition.....
What I cannot accept... is some rich fucker on a private plane, who is only rich because he made me and my family accept risks for his greater profit . That's the real issue, not whether or not risk exists. What is so wholly unconscionable about them pushing the risks on to us, is the information asymmetry whereby the risk is explained differently, that it's in accordance with established production guidelines, blah, blah, blah. It's the lies, and then it's the willful ignorance of the truth, when the truth becomes inconvenient to the executives wallets and the all mighty shareholder.
Unlike you pathetic attempt to paint my objections as fear mongering, corporations have been wildly successful, or the PEOPLE inside them, at knowingly pushing risks onto consumers for profit. If I tell you to go into a building and pick up an object and bring it back to me for $50, are you going to be so tough when you're paralyzed from the faulty equipment I failed to mention? I don't think so pal. You'll bitch, moan, cry, and try to get a viral video about the mean executive man who told you to go into the building without explaining to you those additional risks. You'll complain wildly from your wheel chair on how regulation needs to exist to protect you.
Guess what? I get to feel this way with a free pass since the FDA has made it plenty clear that thousands of deaths due to reckless science, falsified studies, poor manufacturing oversight, etc. not being properly managed by the FDA, isn't enough to follow their own laws and bring accountability to these corporations. In our medical community, they applied to the Too-Big-To-Fail mantra and let people run free (and richer) that should be in prison for mass murder. Just like Wall Street gets handed a pass, a bunch of money, and no accountability, the Medical community gets treated special.
Ohh, I already fucking said I would take my kids should I ever have to them to another country. I don't argue the overall scientific facts surrounding vaccines, just the particulars about some new ones, and whether or not regulation exists and is appropriate. Now, that's an issue for governments, NOT science. My complete lack of confidence is in the scientific and medical community's ethics and integrity, at least in the U.S. I do believe it should be possible in a suitably advanced country with good healthcare (U.S is way way behind) to trust the source of the vaccines. Their regulatory bodies might not be wholly corrupt institutions.
Fuck, our FDA is led by a Monsanto puppet. Tell me about your sophisticated understanding of the risks and their sources again? I wait with bated breath.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @07:40AM
You're a physics major, you know about how when you measure something you need to account for all the influences. Why don't you demand that from the people studying vaccines, since they want to mandate them for all of humanity? Look at the evidence they present to the public*, they don't attempt accounting for shit. Yet you'll let them get away with it. The drop in measles is for sure 100% due to vaccines, no need to rule out or account for any other factors.
What about the propaganda campaigns they ran to convince an apathetic public and doctors that measles was worth eradicating? Would that effect R0 given that people used to spread it on purpose to "get it over with"? What about the gradual vetting of diagnoses with lab tests? What about all the theories regarding contagion (SIR, etc) that assume well mixing populations of constant size? They use those to justify what percent of people need to get vaccinated. Have you ever seen a paper able to fit the data in the plots shown on that wikipedia page? I haven't, and afaict they can't with 90% vaccination rates. Did you check or are you taking this stuff on faith?
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine#Effectiveness
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @11:39PM
This is a problem with *any* news organization large enough to reach a wide audience, whether it's commercial/media-centric, commercial/some-other-industry-centric, government-affiliated, non-profit, whatever.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @11:53PM
Apple's not a news organization.
This is more like saying "this is a problem with any television."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Friday June 12 2015, @01:11AM
There is a problem with any television. The content regularly available for it blows.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kaszz on Friday June 12 2015, @01:31AM
More like the television manufacturer may withhold information on television issues. Thus the television makers shouldn't be in control of content. Separation of powers if you will.
Would Apple report on:
* Metal only being disruptive without any real good gains?
* That Facetime sucks?
* Apple iOS 7.0.6 bricks Bricks iPads and iPhones
* Bad SSL implementation in Apple operating systems.
* Being involved in anti-poaching agreements?
* Outright security flaws?
* Pros- and cons of alternatives to Apple Pay (or die?)
* That iOS 7 update silently removes encryption of email attachments?
* Poor working conditions for makers of Apple products?
* Using permission of the Apple app store for political stances or purposes? like banning apps for gay etc.
etc..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @02:34AM
> More like the television manufacturer may withhold information on television issues.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the analogy. This isn't about Apple censorsing critical reporting of Apple. This is about Apple picking and choosing whatever topics it wants to promote or demote as it sees fit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @11:59PM
that you cannot remove. Will go into my blackhole icon "extras" along with contacts, calculator, tips, podcasts, passbook, newsstand, ibooks, health, game center, stocks, voice memos, itunes store and apple watch. Soon to add: videos, notes, reminders, app store, and facetime to finishing cleanup the first page.
Apple things they are smart with UI design... most of it is clutter. Contacts are available though the phone UI, so why do I need another on main page? so is facetime.
Messages, I am still torn to exile or not. Really, only use it when on-call, to allow server messages to have a simple way to have different ring, only for that week, once every 3 months. All the time it is filtered to subfolders in email. Made email filter at office send a text messages also. So click its on, click its off. rest of the ways it is standard, standard, standard.
I ramble on...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @08:03AM
Simple solution: don't use hitlerphone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @10:54AM
"gift" from company. CIO does not like open source "full of viruses". :)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday June 12 2015, @12:04AM
And the New York Times is "all the news thats fit to print." And fairly accurate in as much as if they refuse to print it most of the rest go along with making it an unstory. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Is the objection here that Apple is now going to join the club of gatekeepers or that it threatens to replace the old ones? Help me out here. Anybody who limits themselves to ANY of these data silos pretending to be THE news is inherently an uninformed and ignorant semi-savage. Ya gotta graze far and wide across the media landscape to have a clue.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Friday June 12 2015, @12:26AM
No kidding.
Well said, BTW.
Just like the 'blowup' that occurred with Fox News offering to host the Rep. Primaries, but limit it to the 'top ten' candidates.
Now, the Republican Party has a 'clown car' escapade to deal with due to a media corp. trying to play 'gatekeeper', and several more chiming in. *pops popcorn* ;-)
That is one of the side effects of equating freedom of speech with cash, and empowering corporations politically.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @12:31AM
I would read TFA but I'm not touching Wired with anyone's ten foot pole. But from the summary, it sounds like the app is intended to be an aggregator from news sources and the fear is that Apple may not aggregate fairly or without any bias. The reader wouldn't be trying to limit themselves to any single news source. There would be multiple news sources, but Apple would ultimately decide who or what is "newsworthy". Imagine seeing nothing but countless "15 things that Android users don't realize until it's too late" articles from Cracked/Wired/Gizmodo every day, and you have the worst case scenario.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @12:51AM
Google News is an aggregator, and I don't hear a lot of complaints about bias.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 12 2015, @01:18AM
They are "do no evil?" (unless there's shareholders with power)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 12 2015, @10:31AM
I do this, reading left-wing and right-wing sources, and get most of what I consider to be traditional reporting from Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and BBC. But still don't feel informed by any of it, because I worked for an American President and know how much the government and the wealthy manipulate the press and how incredibly lazy journalists are about their job. They like telling stories now more than they like reporting facts.
I don't feel "informed" about anything, though, until I come here and see it dissected by Soylentils who have a clue and have thought about things from an angle I hadn't considered.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by darkengine on Friday June 12 2015, @12:20AM
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
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
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
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
I use it every day. There's a nice iOS reader called Newsstand.
(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Friday June 12 2015, @02:57AM
It is coming directly from their own sites. Underneath it's an RSS feed. And users can add whatever feeds they like. It's ultimately "delivering" the news in the same way that a web browser "delivers" the news.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday June 12 2015, @06:15AM
-s.
While I've been working on an iOS App since time began among the reasons I haven't actually shipped it is that by doing so, I will be drawing traffic and organic links to Apple's website and not my own.
I have News on my iPad; I think you're mistaken that it's being introduced with iOS 9. I thought it was quite cool but then it said I can download issues from the iTunes Store.
Fuck that if I want to read the news on my ipad I want to download the publications from the sites of each individual newspaper.
Is the berkeley barb going to be carried by News?
The People's Daily of the Communist Party of China?
Whatever the american nazi party prints?
Am I going to be permitted to use News to read Playboy but only for its insightful articles?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @08:09AM
I'm not well enough informed to argue for or against.
It's a real shame the www has turned into an oligopoly.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday June 12 2015, @01:43PM
A common carrier carries something without discrimination. No turning things away at all, but in exchange they're immune to being charged for carrying bad things. The only way for a news outlet to be a common carrier would be if it was nothing but a talking head reading the Twitter pages of random idio- Oooh, I see your point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @03:02PM
ECHO... Echo... echo... cho... ho... ooo...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @05:29PM
well some people just like and subscribe to the overall apple philosophy.
it's like a famous and well sought after psychiatrist only now with a hardware / trinket outlet that let's iPhilosophy subscriber signal their commonness with a *wink*.
now overall i haven't felt that apple is evil .. maybe a bit jealous sometimes at how (supposedly) care-free they go about their lives.
of course there is the danger that it could/might be abused but that interpretation really only depends on if the iCult grows or ..errr... uhm .. shrinks.
anyways with this new iPhilosophy news wisdom outlet i predict that two vortexes will form on this planet.
just like there is a red spot on jupiter there will be two on earth one will be made of iCult followers and .. the rest.
they will probably only touch / meet on the periphery and it will ALWAYS be big news inside the iCult ... uhm .. ahh ... cloud : )