Apple News works in a different way than most other news aggregators: the top posts are curated by a group of human reporters, not algorithms, and Apple is rigorous about what news sources it allows into the app. Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook kept in mind that Apple News has more than 125 million daily users, although the company has yet to announce exactly how many subscribers spend for the premium Apple News Plus service.
Update June 29th, 3:40 pm: Added that The Guardian has actually given that rejoined Apple News in March after leaving in 2017.
While Apple has had a tougher time getting publishers (including the Times) to sign on for its regular monthly News Plus membership– which costs $9.99 per month and offers access to a range of magazines and newspapers (including The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and more)– the totally free variation of Apple News has provided a much bigger selection of news. While the Times just offered a couple of totally free short articles to Apple News, its departure still makes it among the most significant names to abandon Apples service since The Guardian left in 2017 just to rejoin the service earlier this year in March.
The New York Times has revealed that, since today, it will no longer be distributing articles in the Apple News app, making it one of the biggest publishers to end its association with Apples publishing platform.
In a memo revealing the change, Meredith Kopit Levien, primary operating officer at the Times, said the business wants “a direct course for sending out those readers back into our environments, where we manage the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our company rules.” She added that the papers “relationship with Apple News does not fit within these criteria.”
For its part, Apple said in a statement to the Times that it “just provided Apple News a couple of stories a day,” so there should not be too much of a change in the general content for readers. With the media service becoming a progressively precarious market now squeezed even further throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, its possible the Times defection might lead to other publishers looking to strike out on their own, too.
