Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Please Follow in Apple News

Adam Engst:

Apple News is focused on large publishers and therefore needs quite a number of articles for training its natural language parser. Since we publish only about 50 articles per month, whereas a large publisher might release several times that per day, I was told that it could take several months before the algorithm knew what to do with our content.

[…]

Most notably, I was told that Apple News cares quite deeply about the number of people who follow a particular publication—the more followers, the more likely Apple News is to recommend that publication’s articles to other people.

[…]

However, Apple subsequently told me that the Apple News algorithm also takes some of its cues from those [section] names, so I’ve added more sections that match up with topic names (Apple, Mac, iOS, Cybersecurity, and so on) that people can find in Apple News when searching for specific topics of interest.

You can follow this blog on Apple News here.

Previously: Switching From RSS to Apple News Format.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter


I tried your link to follow in Apple News but the app comes back with an error message that says “This channel is not currently available in your region.” I’m in Canada.


@Jeff Sorry about that. I’m not sure why that would be since the channel is configured to be available in every region. And I think you even get Apple News+ in Canada. I’m not sure where to get support from Apple for News Publisher.

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