Takeaways

• There is no transparency around the editorial team and algorithm that selects news for 13.5m people in the UK.
• Previous research has shown biases in the Apple News algorithm but we don’t know if these have been corrected, or have worsened, over time.
• It is concerning for news access and consumption that the UK’s most widely used news app—used by 20% of the population—lacks meaningful transparency and accountability.

Context

Apple News is the in-built news aggregator app found on Apple devices such as iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. The app is only available in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States (Apple) and offers a paid for option that allows readers to access subscription-only publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Time magazine, and hundreds of others.

Apple News does not publish its own stories, but instead collates articles from other publishers. It is comparable to other services such as Google News and Flipboard. We often refer to these services as news aggregators or news intermediaries.

In October 2023, the Press Gazette reported that Apple News was the most used news app in the UK, beating out the state broadcaster, BBC News, and other well known outlets such as Sky News and The Guardian:

Rank	News App	Audience
1	Apple News	13,495,986
2	BBC News	12,602,597
3	Sky News	2,866,748
4	The Guardian	2,261,402
5	Google News	1,802,316
6	Upday for Samsung	1,797,684
7	Money Saving Expert	1,736,362
8	Daily Mail	1,711,358
9	AOL – News, Mail & Video	1,183,349
10	The Telegraph UK	869,185

While official statistics on the total number of users can be elusive, Statista reports that in Q2 2020 the Apple News app had 125m users worldwide. Matching this up to the 2023 statistics above means about 10% of users are in the UK. The app looks like this:

The app is split into four main sections: Today, News+, Sport and Following. There is a search function and a space to view your favourite publishers or those you’ve chosen to follow, and users can swipe to downrank topics or publishers. There is also the option to ban certain topics and publishers from your feed on the app. Apple News also sends push notifications concerning breaking news, though these are limited compared to some publishers which send 100s of notifications to users.

Who runs Apple News?

As shown above, when you open the Apple News app the first text on the screen is the date and the following text:

Top Stories

Chosen by the Apple News editors.

Several questions immediately arise from this: Are these editors people, or machines? If they are people, is it a board of editors? Are their decisions scrutinised, or do they editorialise without oversight? What is their editorial policy? Do they have a code of practice/conduct that guides decision making?

According to a New York Times report (🔒) from 2018 titled “Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines” it is a team of human editors that decides these, making them, as the article states, the “most powerful figures in English-language media”. Despite this, there is no publicly available information about these editors. Why then do these figures not appear to have any public transparency or accountability?

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the top 5 next most frequently used apps in the UK which all have publicly available editorial policies: BBC News (2,000 words), Sky News (1,600 words), The Guardian (5,600 words), Google News (861 words. Also an aggregator service). Yet, Apple News has no published editorial policy. In other words: Apple News is the outlier in the UK news market.

This lack of transparency is nothing new. In a 2019 article in The Guardian concerning the role of Apple News in UK General Election coverage, Apple declined to comment on how Apple News and its editors function. Editor-in-chief, Lauren Kern, did provide the following statement to The Guardian:

“Curation has always been a guiding principle of Apple News. We select high-quality articles from trusted sources to help readers get up to speed on the most relevant news and the most important issues of the day [...] In the UK election guide, our team of editors will spotlight well-sourced, well-reported stories to provide Apple News readers with reliable news and information from a wide range of news outlets.”


Five years later however, there has been no clarification about what the editors at Apple News classify as well-sourced, well-reported stories. Apple News is a complete black box. While this is normal practice for proprietary algorithms and secrecy is largely accepted as a way for companies to protect their algorithms, it is very unusual for human editorial policy. 

How does Apple News make money?

The two main sources of income for Apple News are:

• Apple News+, £12.99, $9.99, AU$19.99, CA$16.99
• In-story advertising space

Apple News is a very profitable venture for Apple, and according to Statista and Apple Insider:

“Apple's news aggregator app, Apple News+, could generate total revenue of 2.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2023. This forecast is based on the estimate that the app brought in revenue of 550 million U.S. dollars in 2020 from a paid subscriber base amounting to around 11 million. The analyst projected that subscriber numbers could hit 19 million by 2023, which could result in 1.1 billion U.S. dollars in subscription revenue and over one billion U.S. dollars in digital ad revenue.” (Statista/Apple Insider, 2023)

The direction of growth for Apple News has also been very successful, with consistent year-on-year gains for its usership and revenue. Unusually for the normally sleek Apple, the ads you find in stories in the Apple News app are the types of low quality, clickbait-style adverts many of us have come to associate with online news. The below shows four adverts shown in articles from The Times, The Independent, Tatler, and Variety.

Given the volume of users that Apple News has, its advertising space will be a considerable source of income as a means of delivering ads to millions of people in the UK. According to the Apple Support pages, Apple News advertisers can capitalise on “Apple’s commitment to privacy and personal relevancy [that] builds trust amongst readers” and reach 60 million active monthly users with “impactful display, video, and native ads”. Apple details general content guidelines for advertisers, ranging from ensuring correct spelling to banning adverts which contain deceptive or profane content. Apple offers up over 1,500 words of guidelines for advertisers, yet still does not have anything on the guidelines used by the Apple News editors themselves.

Protecting news consumers in the UK

The body responsible for regulating UK press is the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). However, because news aggregators are platforms not publishers (a hot debate in the tech industry) they slip through the regulatory cracks in the UK. Consequently they are not subject to the IPSO Editors’ Code of Practice and operate without IPSO oversight. As it stands, any oversight, transparency, and accountability is entirely discretionary. As the UK regulator for communications, Ofcom notes, online intermediaries such as news aggregators “exert a significant influence on how we read news online”, yet this influence goes unregulated.

Put simply, I do not think this is good enough. Fundamentally, we lack any meaningful insight into the operations of the UK’s largest news app, including the individuals who manage it and the curative algorithms it employs. This lack of transparency is concerning and we should establish greater transparency, accountability, and oversight over Apple News and its decision-making processes.

The publication of a dedicated webpage or a policy document by Apple News could provide much-needed clarity on the concerns I have raised here. A resource of this type would help clarify the platform’s operational procedures, including details on content selection, algorithmic curation, and the roles of individuals involved in decision-making processes. This transparency would not only address questions about editorial independence and potential biases but also foster public trust by demonstrating Apple News’s commitment to accountability and responsible content management.

Additional Notes
I was originally going to title this blog post ‘Who controls Apple News?’ as I felt that accurately represented the blog post. However, I am conscious that the idea of media control taps into an often conspiratorial discourse of media elites and secret control of the media, which is something I did not want to associate this blog post with. Consequently, I opted for ‘The mystery of Apple News’ to reflect the lack of transparency surrounding the platform.

I’m a daily user of Apple News and, as the screenshots above show, I subscribe to Apple News+. When I give talks and training workshops where I discuss how to take in balanced media, I recommend news aggregators including Apple News. They are an easy and free way to ensure you are consuming balanced media from a diverse range of sources. This makes the calls for transparency above even more important: these apps are a great way to access news in the UK, but the current lack of transparency risks undermining them.

Update: 15th November 2024

Following the news in the US that the Washington Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may have intervened to prevent the Post’s endorsement of a presidential candidate, I’ve decided to update this post.

For some context, Bezos reportedly intervened in the Post’s tradition of endorsing a candidate so he could protect his other business ventures, such as the Blue Origin space programme.

This then raises the question: do the editors at Apple News intentionally advance Apple’s strategic business interests, for example by suppressing unfavourable coverage or promoting favourable content? Could Tim Cook or other Apple executives intervene with Apple News’ operations to stop them highlighting a story they do not like? The answer is that we simply do not know.

We do not know whether Apple, the world’s biggest company, is using Apple News, the UK’s biggest news app, to advance its interests or not. This is because of the lack of transparency at Apple News and the entire operation being a black box. This only increases my above concerns about oversight and transparency and again highlights the case for a reimagining of how news aggregators in the UK are regulated.