Topic: Proprietary tech
Apple News Hires Former New York Magazine Editor as First Editor in Chief (May 25, 2017)
In our second news item about proprietary news formats today, Apple has hired Lauren Kern as its first Editor in Chief for Apple News. She was previously executive editor at New York Magazine and then took on more of a managerial role across several publications owned by the parent company. Apple has lots of editors today, but their role is curatorial rather than truly editorial, and I wonder if that will change with Kern’s appointment. Apple is purely an aggregation platform for today, but we could see it do more with pulling news together on a particular topic and perhaps highlighting the best coverage. Kern’s magazine background might also suggest a focus on more long-form content, which Apple could either continue to curate or perhaps begin to create or commission itself. Apple News as a platform has done relatively well, driving some decent traffic for at least some publishers, but doesn’t have nearly the reach of Facebook’s Instant Articles or the Google-led AMP format. It’s also at the early stages from a monetization perspective, offering only ads as a business model broadly and then subscriptions only for a handful of publications today. I would expect the subscription model to open up later this year, probably with an announcement at WWDC in a couple of weeks, so that would be another interesting angle for Kern to work on.
via 9to5Mac
Facebook Builds Google AMP and Apple News Tools into Instant Articles SDK (May 25, 2017)
I’m generally a skeptic of proprietary or customized forms of web publishing because I believe they create extra work for publishers, which in turn takes us back to earlier eras when smaller publishers weren’t able to compete with larger publishers on a level playing field (this is something I’ve written about in detail here). But they also have other objectionable aspects, including making some very powerful companies more powerful. Facebook’s Instant Articles is a great example of all that, and it’s struggled to gain momentum in part because it’s not clear to most publishers that it actually helps them make more money than simply linking out to their sites, and in part because it doesn’t support any kind of payment method today. Facebook’s Journalism Project, on the other hand, is supposed to address some of publishers’ frustrations, and as part of Facebook’s response to those frustrations, it’s tweaking its SDK for Instant Articles to add support for the Google-led AMP format and eventually also for Apple News. That could help assuage concerns about having to publish in four different formats separately (FB IA, AMP, Apple News, and the web), but it’s obviously only helpful to those publishers big enough or tech-savvy enough to work with an SDK and a custom CMS to feed it. And it does nothing to address the very real monetization issues or the sense of loss of control that has caused some publishers to pull back from Instant Articles lately. This feels like an inadequate bandaid rather than a real solution. Above all, Facebook needs to bring on the monetization tools pronto.
via Facebook Media
Apple plans new smaller Ultra Accessory Connector (UAC) for Made-for-iPhone accessories – 9to5Mac (Feb 6, 2017)
This is one of those reports where we have the alleged what, but not the official why. The last big example of this was the pervasive rumors of the demise of the 3.5mm headphone jack before the iPhone 7 launched. The rumors turned out to be accurate, but none of them came with an explanation, which meant that for months we had screeds about Apple’s anti-consumer stance without any kind of input or defense from Apple, which hadn’t even announced a change yet. With that in mind, though it’s tempting to complain about yet another new connector technology from Apple (on top of USB-C in MacBooks and Lightning in almost everything else), we don’t know yet exactly what it will be used for. At some point this year, Apple will no doubt give us an explanation, and we’ll have to decide whether it’s a sign of courage, user-hostile, or something in-between. (For what it’s worth, I was pretty positive on Apple’s headphone jack transition.)
via 9to5Mac