Apple News and where it fits in my life

As part of Apple's iOS 12.2 release, Apple News was finally made available on Apple phones and tablets in Canada. Before now, it had been available in other countries but not in Canada. This availability coincided with the North American availability of their Apple News+ service.

Apple News is a curated and aggregated news app. In the abstract, it's similar to Google News but it only lives on Apple devices in the form of an app and is not available on the web.

So, what is Apple News+? As far as I can tell, it's Apple News plus these things:

• Full magazine content
• Articles designated as premium articles within Apple News
• Offline reading

Here's what I like about it:

• Clear identification of news source (every single article has a logo indicating the source before you click through to it)
• Mixing of magazine with news content. Magazines do a better job in some areas than newspapers.

Here's what I don't like:

• Locked in to Apple devices. I have a Windows PC and notebook with no intention of changing, and I can't access Apple News at all from there.
• Does not provide full access to news sources. For example, while you get premium Wall Street Journal articles in your feed you can't go back and read the whole WSJ.
• Loss of artistic layout and flow of newspapers - there's no concept of what a newspaper has deemed "front page material", or relatively more important than other content. Apple takes over this role with a uniform utilitarian approach through the app.
• Magazines have table of contents but they show the title only and are not helpful in understanding what an article is about.
• Not very searchable, and the UI for finding sources is a bit confusing (though it makes some sense once you get used to it).

Good luck finding something you read and want to revisit, or if you want to search historical perspectives on a story. That's not what this is about - it's about the here-and-now, and it's why it's more of a supplement than a replacement.

It essentially turns newspapers into time-boxed content providers. But this is similar to how many people watch TV, where channels provide content and the TV service provider presents everything on a level playing field as channels organized in a common schedule.

Imagine if you had to watch TV by going to the schedule for each network and browsing the channels offered only by that network. That's the current state of news. It's not terrible that some companies want to try a new way of doing things.

From what I can tell, though articles display is usually quite clear of clutter, news sources are still free to interject in an article with suggestions of other articles of theirs that you may find interesting, and there does seem to be some formatting control at the source level. Artistic independence is diminished but not fully lost.

I'm trying it out in trial mode at the moment. The big question is: is it worth continuing at $12/mo? A number of times, I've told myself "no", but then I've thought about how much I like using the app. You can use the Apple News app without paying, but you can't read everything in that mode and you lose the magazine integration. It's not a straightforward answer.

I think this needs to be looked at in the context of how news is going to be consumed rather than how news was consumed in the past. I have a newspaper subscription. I have a couple of news magazine subscriptions. To try and stay balanced, the newspaper I subscribe to works against my natural political bias. However, I don't like to get all of my news from one source.

I'd like to have more newspaper subscriptions, but that does get very expensive. If I wanted to add another digital newspaper subscription, for example, it'd be $20/mo. Through newspaper partnerships, I could add additional content to my existing subscription starting at $5/mo.

This adds up and it's hard to justify unless you make your living from discussing news. I have limited time in the day to spend reading news. If I had more subscriptions, I'd read less content from each one but spread my reading across multiple papers meaning the value I obtain from each is lower.

I find news increasingly difficult to read digitally because of intrusive advertising that is getting increasingly aggressive - even on the online edition of the newspaper I pay to subscribe to.

My newspaper contains a lot of syndicated content. It is also now regularly making certain online content unavailable unless I pay more. It regularly "forgets" who I am and requires me to sign in, moreso than many other sites do.

I increasingly read my content digitally because of how portable it is, especially when I am interested in many sources.

I don't like the idea of having a separate source or app for every single news source I want to read - especially not for sources that I consider secondary preferences.

So how does Apple News help with this?

• It provides access to a diverse set of high-quality sources and clearly identifies those sources so that I can assess how much I trust it.
• It lets me monitor topics rather than sources (but lets me read more from specific sources if I want to) and gives different perspectives on that topic that I can dive deeper into if I want to.
• It blends magazine content - magazines do better in some areas than newspapers.
• It presents the content beautifully whether you are reading on a phone or tablet
• It removes many or most distractions from advertising and clickbait (which also helps with battery life and data consumption).

It essentially gives me what I want in a modern, digital "newspaper" and provides a solution to all of the problems above. If I continue past the trial, I'll be sending money into the world of journalism that likely wouldn't have gone there before.

It's a great start. I hope it only gets better.