Apple hiring editing team to curate content for iOS 9's News app
Ahead of iOS 9's debut this fall, Apple is hiring a team of editors to find and curate content for its News aggregation app, according to a new job listing spotted on Apple's website.
Apple is searching for people to "identify and deliver the best in breaking national, global, and local news," the listing first discovered by AppleInsider says. Editors will ultimately be helping to guide the content in the News stream, for instance by managing categories according to expertise, producing newsletters, and coordinating with publishers and newsrooms.
Candidates are expected to have at least a bachelors degrees in Journalism, Communications, or a related field, and five or more years of newsroom experience with a "strong emphasis on mobile news delivery." On top of this Apple is asking that people be familiar with content analytics and using social networking tools.
When Apple announced News during last week's WWDC keynote, it focused primarily on partnerships with major publishers, although it said that "articles can come from anywhere." The job listing suggests that Apple will not only avoid reliance on the majors but heavily curate its news flow, instead of simply pulling from RSS feeds and/or algorithms.
The company appears to be making a general shift towards curated content. In May for instance it made most of its App Store Games category hand-picked. The same approach is being taken with Apple Music, with features like Connect and Beats 1.
iOS 9 will debut sometime this fall. With that update News will replace Newsstand, which currently just gathers together news-related apps and provides functions like background updates.
Apple is searching for people to "identify and deliver the best in breaking national, global, and local news," the listing first discovered by AppleInsider says. Editors will ultimately be helping to guide the content in the News stream, for instance by managing categories according to expertise, producing newsletters, and coordinating with publishers and newsrooms.
Candidates are expected to have at least a bachelors degrees in Journalism, Communications, or a related field, and five or more years of newsroom experience with a "strong emphasis on mobile news delivery." On top of this Apple is asking that people be familiar with content analytics and using social networking tools.
When Apple announced News during last week's WWDC keynote, it focused primarily on partnerships with major publishers, although it said that "articles can come from anywhere." The job listing suggests that Apple will not only avoid reliance on the majors but heavily curate its news flow, instead of simply pulling from RSS feeds and/or algorithms.
The company appears to be making a general shift towards curated content. In May for instance it made most of its App Store Games category hand-picked. The same approach is being taken with Apple Music, with features like Connect and Beats 1.
iOS 9 will debut sometime this fall. With that update News will replace Newsstand, which currently just gathers together news-related apps and provides functions like background updates.
Comments
Jason Snell might take the job at the right price.
Why can't Apple just let users pick what they want to add to the news app? Why do we need Apple to curate content for us. I'm sure many of the things I'm interested in won't be the same as those working in Cupertino.
I think the main reason in the beginning is that Apple News is a custom format that has to be authored much like iBooks. Once the major publishers of news are on board with the proprietary format then they will have more diverse content. I think making the authoring software available to regular Apple users to develop their skills would open up some great employment opportunities at major news outlets just like being proficient in Adobe design apps will pretty much guarantee a high paying position.
The Daily was ahead of its time.
Why can't Apple just let users pick what they want to add to the news app? Why do we need Apple to curate content for us. I'm sure many of the things I'm interested in won't be the same as those working in Cupertino.
Every news site is curated. Even Bing.com/news and news.Google.com are curated by someone or something (algorithm).
I hope they open it up. I certainly have no plans to get my news from the NY Slimes.
Why can't Apple just let users pick what they want to add to the news app? Why do we need Apple to curate content for us. I'm sure many of the things I'm interested in won't be the same as those working in Cupertino.
Why to you find something negative to say about everything under the sun?
I'd be interested to see just what Apple curates, and then determine if it's worth my time or not.
I can see the value of curated content, as people in general are stupid, and average standards and tastes have recently been distinctly degraded.
And this is to say nothing about the puppet masters who tell the major publishers what to say. It's ingriguing to me to see if Apple can somehow escape such scrutiny and control.
I hope the poster who says "that Apple News is a custom format that has to be authored much like iBooks" is wrong. I assume he means those special iBooks Author books. iBooks itself takes standard epub. I just sent iBooks my latest book, Senior Nurse Mentor (about nursing). Apple took the epub that Adobe created from the print version without a complaint. Amazon took that same epub and turned it into their format. That I can live with.
Take it from me, a small publisher. We're drowning in various formats. There's print, there's HTML for online, there's epub and for some situations Amazon's mobi/KF8, not to mention other custom magazine formats, including perhaps an in-house one.
All those formats are bad enough when you're doing books. With periodicals coming out every month and filled with images, ads, graphics and who knows what else, yet another format is as welcome as a hungry cat at a mouse party.
If Apple doesn't have a News plug-in for InDesign ready for release soon, this idea may bomb badly. They'll be in a Catch-22. Without publishers, they can't get readers. Without readers, they can't get publishers.
Oh I agree there are a lot of stupid people. I like to call them the low information crowd. But who gets to decide what smarts to fill them up with? I'm pretty sure the stuff I would throw in front of them would be vastly different than what Tim Cook would send their way.
Why can't Apple just let users pick what they want to add to the news app? Why do we need Apple to curate content for us. I'm sure many of the things I'm interested in won't be the same as those working in Cupertino.
If you are chaffing that much over the walled garden perhaps you should just move along and find a different platform to complain about. Sounds like Windows would suit you nicely. And we wouldn’t have to pass over your negativity all the time.
Jason Snell might take the job at the right price.
As would Rene Ritchie.
For Apple news maybe but the News app is going to be much more than that.
Oh I agree there are a lot of stupid people. I like to call them the low information crowd. But who gets to decide what smarts to fill them up with? I'm pretty sure the stuff I would throw in front of them would be vastly different than what Tim Cook would send their way.
Well, if you're somehow saying NO ONE should decide, then you're dead wrong, because the stupid hoi poloi can be counted on to come up with the tawdriest degraded crap, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any content worth looking at.
I honestly think all this babble about "openness" is just veiled propaganda intent on suppressing quality content. By quality content, I mean most likely what Apple is now talking about under the term "curated." I may or may not agree with the company's choices, but I think I can assume that at least a good portion of it will be worth reading.
I'm also in favor of placing one person in charge and that person to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", so to speak. If there's a "fotune" to be made, then it will be the result of a smoothly running machine which that person establishes, and for which that person is accountable.
We will vote for or against with our time and/or our wallets.
why cant readers of rumor sites just not assume suggestions and rumors are facts? why cant we parse them as rumors and wait to see how the actual final product is before criticizing it? oh yeah, that would be boring.
I read both regularly to see what the heck they are each reporting. The are both very specifically biased.
"Curation" is what they do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Smithsonian, or the Louvre. The content is carefully selected, unique, and presented in context, usually from an abundance of notable source material.
Please stop using the word "curate" to refer to grabbing and republishing web content. A bunch of millennial hacks reposting previously stolen content from Engadget and Pinterest isn't curation - it's just an agglomeration of already existing crap, without filtration.
"Curation" is what they do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Smithsonian, or the Louvre. The content is carefully selected, unique, and presented in context, usually from an abundance of notable source material.
And that is quite possibly exactly the difference between what News will be doing, and what Huffington Post does.