Apple News: an infoslob perspective

Summary

This post provides an overview of the Apple News app from a conceptual data model perspective. If you want to go beyond basic News app features and fully understand the app’s capabilities, a single model diagram included later in this post describes nearly everything you can do in the News app.

If you haven’t used News before, please take a moment to explore Apple’s overview. You might also find the News Wikipedia article useful for gaining an understanding of the history of the News app.

The News app has been available since September 2015. Tim Cook noted during Apple’s March 2019 services event that Apple News was then the #1 news app and that News users were at that time reading 5 billion stories per month. That was before the introduction of Apple’s News+ service, which is likely to entice many more people to become regular News readers (but none on Android or Windows devices, since Apple doesn’t offer News for those platforms, at least as of April 2019).

My goal for this post is to provide an overview of the News conceptual data model, in order to explain how the various News app features fit together. Although I believe News is a useful app/service, some of its capabilities are not immediately obvious, and its user experience has a few quirks. In general, however, I’m hopeful the News app will help me advance in my recovering-infoslob quest, and I suspect you may find it useful for a wide range of news-related activities as well.

What follows:

• A brief tour of the News user experience, to provide some context-setting on its capabilities
• The News app conceptual model: a tour
• My News App feature wish list: some projections about what Apple may add to the News app in the future
• To be added: a list of possible changes/additions for future versions of my News app conceptual data model

A Brief Tour of the News User Experience

To ensure we’re on the same page, I’ll start with a very brief review of the News user experience. I’ve used iPhone screenshots but the News user experience and conceptual model are mostly consistent across Apple’s platforms.

When you launch the News app, you’ll see something like this:

That’s the News app’s Today channel view. By default, it presents a personalized collection of stories selected by Apple news curators and influenced by your historical News reading. The other views available via the controls at the bottom of the app display include News+ and Following.

News+ is Apple’s subscription-based service, providing access to hundreds of magazines, newspapers (including the WSJ and LA Times, at launch), and other premium channels. The News+ view starts with collections of available magazines, followed by an index of personally followed magazines, and then by several sections with stories from multiple News+ channels.

The third tab, Following, has several sections:

The Following view starts with a search box and a list of the Apple-managed and other channels and topics you’ve followed. The first channel in the list, Morning Digest, is managed by Apple (and changes to Afternoon/Evening digest later during weekdays; it’s replaced by a Weekend Pursuits channel during weekends). The rest of the list includes a mix of channels I’ve followed and sequenced. I’m a News+ subscriber; if I weren’t, some premium channels such as the LA Times, WSJ, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New Yorker wouldn’t be available for me to follow and read.

The iPad and Mac versions of the News app put the Today and News+ channels at the top of the Following sidebar, incidentally, but the user experience is otherwise identical.

As you scroll down the Following view, you next see a collection of Siri-recommended channels:

The recommendations are based on your reading history — optionally (and by default) influenced by your News app reading activities as well as content you’ve read in Safari and other apps. You can opt to either love (heart) or dislike (crossed-out heart) a suggested channel with the icons to the right of the channel names; loving a channel adds it to your collection of followed channels, and disliking a channel blocks it.

As you scroll beyond the Siri suggestions section, you’re presented with options including the ability to review saved stories and the stories in your reading history (stories you previously viewed).

You can also click to the big red button to discover new channels and topics; doing so presents a collection of channels for your consideration:

Finally, the Following view provides access to manage notification settings, review blocked channels and topics, and manage your paid (paywalled, non-News+) subscriptions.

Just a few more News examples, before jumping into the News conceptual data model: here’s a snapshot of the Apple News Spotlight channel (selected from the top part of my Following view):

A few notes on this News+ channel view snapshot:

• It’s organized into sections — Main, Best Reads, and Good News, with section names in small type just below the channel title
• You can opt to love or dislike the channel by clicking the heart or crossed-out-heart icons (the channel is already in my Following list, in this example, since I previously loved it)
• Stories can contain videos, which can be played directly from the channel view
• Channel views can contain stories from multiple sources (other channels)

Clicking into a story, you’ll see something like:

Some notes:

• You can navigate to the next or previous stories in the channel/section story sequence by clicking the back-arrow at the top of the frame or “NEXT arrow” at the bottom
• You can change the story text size; if the channel supports different text sizes, your text size setting will thereafter apply to all stories from the channel
• You can use platform Share options for a variety of story-related sharing activities
• Some channels are publications with “it’s complicated” subscription relationships; in this case, the National Geographic article with a video clip was accessible to me because I’m a News+ subscriber and National Geographic is one of the News+ sources; the publisher also inserted an in-line promotion encouraging me to sign up for a full digital subscription, however, providing a reminder that News+ channel publishers don’t have to make all of their stories available to News+ subscribers (for another example of the publisher-specific “actual results may vary” News+ reality, see this consolidated tweetstream from the editor of The New Yorker’s website, clarifying what’s not included in the News+ view of the publication)

If you opt to subscribe to a channel (e.g., a News+ magazine) via the News app, you’ll see something like this:

From this view, you can create a new National Geographic subscription via your Apple iTunes account or, if you’re already a subscriber (outside of News+), enter your National Geographic account id and password. If you do either, you’ll thereafter see a “SUBSCRIBED” label next to the channel name (as I have for The Washington Post in the first Following view example above).

The News App Conceptual Model

With that News app whirlwind tour in mind, it’s time to review the News app conceptual data model. I’ve found that this type of modeling can be an exceptionally useful way to learn and master a topic domain. If I’ve accurately captured the News app conceptual data model, for example, you’ll be able to use a single model diagram and answer any News questions that may come to mind with a confident yes or no.

If you’re unfamiliar with conceptual data modeling, please take a brief detour to review A quick note on conceptual data modeling.

Let’s start with the basic News content model:

The basic News content conceptual data model is organized into three entities:

Channel, which includes channel types for magazine, newspaper, web site, and any Apple-approved feed formatted in RSS or Apple News Feed (ANF)

• Channels are identified by their Apple-assigned channel names

Section, which is a named and sequenced collection of stories

• Each channel has a default (latest stories) section, and a channel may have several sections; for example, the WSJ channel (in the U.S.) has Top Stories, U.S., World, Business & Finance, Opinion, and Life & Arts
• A section is identified by its section name and its associated channel

Story, which is usually a piece of narrative content optimized for human reading

• A story is identified by its story id — an Apple-assigned URL; for example, the story id for the National Geographic Jane Goodall story is https://apple.news/AS_60ZAQmSpKLYy5k7Xiuvg
• Stories are sequenced within associated sections

Stories can be more like web pages than traditional documents; for example, the first story within many News+ publications is essentially a table of contents page (an index of links to other stories in the issue)

The other attributes in the initial model fragment are straightforward, so I won’t review each in more detail.

Note that I’ve made a simplifying assumption: I don’t distinguish between channel and topic. Since both represent sequenced collections of sections and stories, it doesn’t seem useful to create a separate topic entity in the model diagram. I also expect Apple may find more elaborate things to do with topics in future releases of the News app, when more of the underlying Apple knowledge graph is exposed in the News app. For now, in any case, it’s simplest to mentally substitute “channel” whenever you see “topic” in the News app.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why the News user experience is centered around “channel” and not “publication”, that may be due to the underlying content syndication model, supporting ANF and RSS; both formats describe content in terms of channels. That may be an example of an underlying implementation model finding its way into a user experience model (an unfortunately common pattern, in apps/services), but it’s also possible the News app designers considered all of the possible publication types available in the app and concluded “channel” was a reasonable choice to describe the collection of content types.

I also admit I cheated a bit in the model fragment above, to keep the first News content model perspective simple. You may be wondering, for example, where channel categories fit in, or how it’s possible for a story to be associated with multiple sections (since the model fragment above has a one-to-many relationship between section and story), or where content components such as embedded videos fit into stories.

Here’s a more detailed and higher-fidelity view of the News content model:

What’s new in this fragment:

• Channels may be associated with categories
• There’s a section story entity; that makes it possible to associate stories with more than one section
• The story item entity makes it possible for stories to have multiple content components, each with its own identifier and sequence (I assume each story is associated with at least one story item)

With that overview of the News content model in mind, let’s next add users to the model. Here’s a model fragment describing News users and their possible channel-level relationships:

Diving into News user details:

• A News user is identified by their Apple id (the email identity associated with their Apple account)
• News users may optionally subscribe to the News+ service; note that any Apple accounts associated with a News+ subscriber’s family account will also have News+ access (at no extra charge)
• iCloud can be used to keep your News activities synchronized across all of your Apple devices running the News app; that’s the default setting option, and you can also turn off iCloud sync, if you want to have different collections of channels on your devices; you might, for example, opt to have primarily mainstream news on your iPhone, entertainment- and/or hobby-related channels on your iPad, and work-related channels on your Mac, but I expect most News users will opt to keep the default of having their preferences and activities synchronized across their Apple devices (the no-iCloud-sync option is not reflected in the model fragment, but we’ll see a related device-specific News feature in a moment.)
• News can find content based on the stories you read in the app along with content you view in Safari (and other apps; I haven’t found a list of other News-trackable apps)
• You can opt to restrict stories that appear in your Today view (along with the News widgets) to channels you follow; if you do so, the Top Stories, Trending Stories, and Featured Stories sections will be removed from your Today channel
• You can opt to have News exclude any stories with explicit content; I can’t find the explicit content preference setting in iOS News, incidentally, but it is included in the macOS News app (via the News/Preferences menu), and I assume it is enforced across all of your devices running News if you have News syncing via iCloud
• You can opt to not display story previews within sections

Many of the News user-level options can be found in the platform-level Settings app (or the News/Preferences menu, for the macOS News app); here’s a snapshot of my settings preferences:

Reviewing the News user channel-related relationships, News users can:

Follow channels

• The sequence of followed channels can be specified in the News app’s Following view (click Edit at the top of the Following list to change the channel sequence)
• You have the option to enable or disable channel-level notifications. By default (with News/iCloud sync active), the channel-level notification preferences apply for the News app across all of your devices, but you can disable News app notifications in platform settings; you might, for example, opt to have News notifications appear on your iPhone, as your primary notifications device, but to have News app-level notifications disabled on your iPad, to minimize interruptions
• If the channel publisher supports it, you can specify your preferred text size for all stories within a channel

Rate channels

• The rating options include love and dislike
• Loving a channel adds it to your collection of followed channels
• Disliking a channel blocks the channel

Capture subscription credentials for specific channels

• That’s an option for subscription-based publications that don’t make all of their sections and/or stories available through News+, such as The Washington Post

Here’s a model fragment with section-level News user details:

What’s new in this fragment:

• The downloaded issue entity describes sections downloaded to a News user’s device
• This will typically be for magazine issues; News+ users can download magazine issues to a device, but doing so does not download the issue to all of the Apple devices associated with their iCloud accounts

To complete the review, here’s the story-level part of the model:

What’s new in this fragment:

The story view entity describes a single story view (i.e., when you click into a story, from a channel/section view), along with the associated view date and time

• You can review your story view activities in the News app’s history view
• Your story views (reading history) sync across all of your devices (by default, with News iCloud-activated), so you can, for example, start reading a story on your iPhone and later resume reading the story on your iPad or Mac, by visiting your story history
• You can also delete your history (all story view instances) at any time; to do so, click Clear at the top of your story history view

A News user can rate (love or dislike) a story

• The News app uses story ratings to generate recommendations for other stories that may be of interest

Stories may be saved; the News app has a saved-story feature similar to Safari’s reading list feature

• That’s a handy option when you run across a long story and want to block time to read it later

The option to save a story is found in the list of share activities. Here’s an example from my iPhone:

Some additional Share options (the activity lists scroll horizontally) include blocking a channel, reporting a concern, opening a story in Safari, and adding a story to your Safari reading list.

The app-specific sharing activity options are also handy. For example, you could share a story to a collaboration-focused group in apps such as Workplace or Facebook, publish a reference to a story in Twitter or WordPress, or create a new note based on the story in Apple Notes, Evernote, or Microsoft OneNote (the list of apps you see in your Share activities list will be limited to apps installed on your device).

The sharing options in the macOS News app appears to be broken as I write this post; at least on my Mac, the News app doesn’t update when I update my device-level share activity preferences (more precisely: if I use the Settings/Extensions interface to specify sharing activity preferences, they’re not updated in the Mac News app interface).

Note that you can also open web sites and web pages into the News app, if you’re using Safari (that is, News app-related activities have been added to the Safari share action list). That can be handy if you’re viewing a Web site in Safari that you want to track in News in the future; for example, I opened The Washington Post’s home page in the News app and added it to my collection of followed channels (I could have also searched for the Post in the News app search box). I might also run across pages while browsing in Safari that I want to revisit in the News app, since many stories have simplified and streamlined formatting when viewed in News.

Turning back to the News conceptual model, here’s the full model diagram:

You may well be wondering, at this point, why I just subjected you to a conceptual data model-centric tour of the News app. I hope to convince you, with this and other Infoslob blog posts, that conceptual data models can be a very useful way to learn and master topic domains.

If I’ve captured an accurate model diagram view of the News app, for example, you can use it as a reference to answer News app-related questions such as:

Can a channel be associated with more than one category?

• No: there’s a one-to-many relationship between category and channel

When you download a magazine issue, will it be available on all of your Apple devices?

• No: a magazine issue (channel section) download is associated with a single device

Can you see all of the stories written by a specific author?

• No: but you can search for the author name; there’s likely to be a News channel (topic) associated with the author, and you can follow that channel; I acknowledge it’s not possible to understand that from the model diagram, but I expect a future version of the News app may promote authors from story attributes to separate entities, in which case the News app may make it easier to view stories by author

Can you organize channels into hierarchical collections, as you can do with Safari bookmarks?

• No: that’d be handy, for example, to group channels related to product domains, hobbies, political candidates, and so on, but it’s not an option in News today; in the model diagram, if the feature were available, a reflexive relationship would be used to depict the channel/sub-channel relationship — channel would have a one-to-many relationship with itself

Is there any way to determine which version of a story you read, if a story has been updated?

• No: there is no (user-visible) story version tracking in the News user experience model

Can you start a conversation about a story — comment on a story and have other News users read and optionally reply to your comment?

• No: there isn’t a conversation feature in the News app, but you can use share activity options to start conversations in other apps/services such as Facebook and Twitter
• This might be a productive future option for Apple, considering the company’s commitment to customer privacy; many News users might be more comfortable engaging in News story-related conversations in an Apple-managed conversation service than sharing/discussing via apps/services such as Facebook, which has a less-than-stellar reputation for personal privacy protection

Another reason it’s useful to explore topic domains with conceptual data models is that there are often consistent patterns evident in multiple model domains, and you can apply what you’ve learned in one domain to new domains you encounter in the future. There are many consistencies across Apple’s News, Music, Podcasts, and Stocks apps, for example, and features you learn in one of the apps are often available in the other apps. Similarly, once you’re familiar with Apple’s notification and share activity models, you know how to use them across multiple Apple apps.

On the other hand, apps that should be similar sometimes aren’t, and those inconsistencies can be confusing. Conceptual model diagrams are a great way to clearly identify such inconsistencies.

I’ll share other app/service conceptual data models in future posts and will focus on the cross-model consistency across most Apple apps as well as some confusing inconsistencies across apps from multiple vendors that, in theory, address the same domains (for example, personal information management similarities and differences across Apple Notes, Evernote, OneNote, and, if I’m feeling ambitious, Lotus Notes…).

News App Feature Wish List

Some capabilities that would be nice to see added in future News app updates:

Notifications with unread story counts by channel, similar to Mail, Feedly, and other apps

• Although that could also easily be overwhelming, when following a large number of channels, so it’d also be good to have the option to turn off the counts

Nested and named collections of channels

• As previously noted, it’d be useful to be able to have a folder-like channel structure for grouping of channels such as project-related channels, hobby-related channels, or channels focused on political candidates

The ability to specify preferences at the author level

• For example, I’d opt to never see stories written by certain political op-ed authors…
• If you want to easily track all stories by or about a specific author, however, you can search for the author name; there’s probably an Apple-managed News channel (topic) focused on the author, which you can follow

The ability to specify keyword filters

• Some people, for example, might find their News reading more productive if they were able to exclude all stories that mention a particularly sensational political figure or two…

An option to have the News app explain why a specific channel or story was recommended

• Similar to Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this?” option

More knowledge graph features

• Apple is building an expansive knowledge graph, and subtly significant aspects of it are starting to appear in Apple apps, such as the ability to use map location data when viewing Apple Card charges (so you can refresh your memory of where you were when you made a specific charge transaction, for example)
• It’d be useful if Apple were to expand the scope of its knowledge graph capabilities within the News app, making it possible to, for example, view other recent stories by an author, or to see the topics associated with a specific story and other stories that pertain to the same topics; Apple could use both publisher-defined story metadata and automated entity extraction to populate topic lists (tangentially, on another subtly significant feature note, iOS Safari already does this to an extent; when you’re viewing a page in Safari and click in the location box — where you enter URLs or search — you’ll often see related topics extracted from the page, just above the iOS keyboard, and you can click on the topics to view related resources)
• A name you might want to keep in mind in this general context, incidentally: John Giannandrea, Apple’s Senior Vice President, Machine Learning and AI Strategy. His Apple Leadership page notes: “Prior to Apple, John spent eight years at Google where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before this he co-founded two technology companies, Tellme Networks and Metaweb Technologies. Earlier in his career John was a senior engineer at General Magic.”

An Apple conversation/collaboration service spanning multiple Apple apps

• I appreciate Apple’s commitment to personal privacy and preferences (such as the ability to restrict explicit content) and would welcome an Apple-managed option to have Twitter/Facebook-style conversations about News channels and stories

To Be Added…

A working list of things I should probably add to future revisions of my News app conceptual data model diagram:

Story view

• New attribute: last location, to continue reading where you left off when last viewing a story

Section view

• There should probably be a section view entity, similar to the story view entity, to track the channel you were viewing when you last used the News app; it should also have a last-viewed location within the section view

iCloud opt-out setting

• If you deactivate News app synchronization via iCloud, your News app activities and preferences apply at a per-device level; that’s not reflected in the current model diagram (imagine all of the relationships the News user entity participates in — except for News user device — were connected to News user device rather than News user; that’d capture the no-iCloud-sync option)

Personalized sections and section story recommendations

• The current model diagram doesn’t reflect personalized recommendations — so my Today channel view would be the same as your Today channel view; that’s not how News works today (by default)
• I opted to keep the model scope a bit simplified, for this post; adding the News user-level recommendations would complicate the model quite a bit, but I’ll keep it on my to-do list… It’s important to appreciate the fact that the News app can handle personalized channel and story recommendations for more than a billion users; that’s a pretty good trick
• This is also an example of the importance of clearly communicating a model’s scope — the model diagram presented in this post provides an overview of the News app from a personal point of view, but it doesn’t account for everything Apple has to handle when it’s providing the News app/service to all app users; model scope is one of many high-level modeling themes I’ll be revisiting in future Infoslob blog posts

That’s it for my first Infoslob blog post on an everyday app/service topic domain. Thanks for your persistence, if you made it this far. I hope you found the post useful and look forward to sharing and discussing additional model-centric perspectives in future posts.

p.s. this was my first long-ish Medium post. Sorry if some of the formatting is less than ideal; the Medium editor is more limited than I anticipated (e.g., no support for sub-bullets? Really?…)