Creating an Experience from a Publisher’s Point of View
Apple News vs. Medium
Recently, I did an overall assessment on different news and content curation platforms, such as Medium, Apple News, and Google AMP, with Medium and Apple News coming out on top for providing the best the experiences for their readers. After coming to this conclusion from a consumer’s point of view, I dove a little deeper to learn what the two platforms offer publishers in the way of creating an experience out of their story through the branding and layout of the design, media and components, and the output of said articles. Before we discuss these specific elements however, we must first learn what publishing tools are available for each platform.
Medium: Medium’s publishing system is all based on their front-end authoring tools both on their website and within their apps. Like many front-end systems, Medium creates barriers for publishers who want more freedom, but with the primary goal to provide a place where independent authors can share their thoughts and knowledge, their system evens the playing field for those who may not have the skills or resources to author, maintain, or market a personal website.
Apple News: Unlike Medium, publishing tools for Apple News are separate systems from the consumers’ side, and there are two of them. News Publisher is an iCloud based system, that recently left beta testing, and is similar to Medium’s publishing tools, because it is all front-end, but it has the most limitations of all of the platforms. News Preview, on the other hand, is a desktop app that is still in beta and works with Apple’s JSON framework to allow publishers to customize their article, within Apple’s guidelines.
Branding and layout
One of the great things that both Medium and Apple News offer for their readers is the clean and consistent design of articles, throughout their apps, due to their implementation of standard layout elements and grid systems. With this being said, it is important that publishers have the ability to brand their articles, from a business, design, and marketing standpoint. When it comes to publishing, Medium gives publishers the freedom to customize the landing page of their publication, with colors, logos, and navigation, but offers the least amount of design flexibility within articles, because they have the same font-styles and color palettes, and layout settings across the board.
For this reason, the Apple News platforms are better for a publication’s branding, because they give publishers the ability to not only brand their publication’s landing pages and customize navigation or “sections,” but they also allow us to customize some layout elements, fonts, and colors of design elements to match the brand and/or the topic of articles within a publication to make the content look unique to a publication, rather than having the same design as every article a reader sees on the platform. With that being said, each Apple News publishing platform gives us different levels of control that we, as publishers, have over the branding, as well as the layout. Like many front-end authoring systems, News Publisher has more constraints than hand-coding an interface (or in this case an article) yourself, such as restricting how the size and alignment of images can be. In fact, it is much like Medium when considering the capabilities designers have to create unique layouts of an article. With that being said, what gives News Publisher the upper hand is freedom to choose from a variety of font styles and color combinations, which can amount to about 32 different combinations. As a disclaimer however, I use the term “freedom” loosely, because unless they fit the brand or article, many of these combinations aren’t as aesthetically pleasing as I had initially hoped. When authoring used the JSON based code, along with News Preview however, Apple news becomes a clear front runner over Medium or New Publisher because designers have almost complete control of how different components not only fit into the layout and grid system, within Apple’s predefined standards, but they also have more power to brand the colors and fonts of their articles to match their organization.
Media and Components
You can have great information, with a good layout, but if it is not engaging, chances are that you will lose your audience before they finish reading what you have to say. For this reason, being able to provide readers with media rich articles is essential to giving your audience an experience they will want to come back for. This can include a variety of things to see and interact with, such as images, videos, embedded content, etc. One of the biggest constraints within the News Publisher system, is the limitation a publisher has to incorporate this kind of media. When I began publishing using the iCloud based system, I expected the capability to include basic elements such as videos, images, and text, similar to Medium’s publishing system, but I was disappointed to find that the front-end system is limited to images and text, with slight variations such as image width and block quotes. With this being said, additional media elements are available for both Medium as well as Apple News, if you are willing use the JSON framework, along with Apple’s New Preview software.
Images: As mentioned above, all of these publishing systems offer the ability to include images, and while that is better than nothing, Medium and Apple News allow readers to not only look at the images, but interact with them as well. Medium and News Preview both allow publishers to create photo mosaics, which readers can tap on, and swipe through to see images at full scale, but New Preview has slight advantages including the ability to add captions to individual images, in addition to the overall mosaic similar to caption capabilities that Medium provides, which is essential so that reader know what they are looking at, when navigating full-scale images. Additionally, Apple News allows authors to incorporate galleries, that provide swiping interactions inline with the rest of article, in addition to the gallery that the mosaic component allows.
Video: This media component was one that was particularly surprising, when I found it wasn’t allowed on Apple’s News Publisher, because video is incorporated into many articles throughout the news industry. Beyond the lack of support on that system however, both Medium and News Preview treat the components similarly, because all you need is a URL (YouTube, Vimeo, or some other source) to embed a video inline.
Embedded Content: Similar to videos, the iCloud based News publisher does not support embeds, but there are ways to incorporate embedded content for Medium and Apple News, if you do so using News Preview and Apple’s JSON framework to provide similar media experiences on both platforms. With that being said, News Preview provides more limitations as to what kind of content can be embedded such as maps and social media posts, while Medium allows anything you want, as long as it is embed.ly friendly. It is important to note however, that while Medium offers more flexibility, figuring out what links are embed.ly friendly and implementing them within the articles can be more complicated than Apple News, because of the terminology the platform uses. For example, when adding an element on Medium, I was under the impression that the code brackets allowed any type of content to be coded into the site, but I soon found that this tool displays code blocks, and that Medium’s publishing only requires an embed.ly friendly URL, while embedded content has designated components within the Apple News framework.
Output
While other elements of these publishing platforms are important, they are not helpful to publishers, unless they are available to others. Within the output of an article however, there can be many aspects that contribute to whether the platform is successful including the rendering of what we have authoring, browsing and how easy it is to find articles, and analytics about how often the article is being viewed.
Rendering: Overall, all three platforms rendered the content I was attempting to publish as expected, with the exception of the header image on Apple News, which I had expected to be responsive to different devices, but instead it was cut off. Aside from this, and the fact that I was unable to complete the publishing process using the Apple News JSON framework, all three platforms seemed to be true to form compared to how the articles looked and functioned during development, as well as across platforms and devices.
Browsing: One of the biggest differences between platforms is how easy it is for your target audience to find the articles you publish. While both Medium and Apple News are moving towards being a place where large organizations can publish their content AND independent authors can publish their work and be noticed, they initially started on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both display articles within the browsing similarly, but Apple News favors larger organizations by showing publications of large media groups such as ESPN, Huffington Post, and Fox News on their home screen, and requires readers to search for independent authors, topics, and publications, while Medium uses a Twitter-like feed that displays articles customized to topics or people you have shown interest in, in the past.
Analytics: Article analytics was something I had not considered when evaluating these different publishing platforms. However, after publishing my articles and finding that Apple News provides an analytics system, I realized how important it really is because, in a way, these publication platforms are sharing content, and drawing attention from consumers, similar to a website. As opposed to Medium’s likes and shares, Apple News reports on unique viewers, total views, average active time, shares, loves, saves, favorites, and videos within a specific time interval. While there is noting too fancy about it, this information provides a lot of helpful information to publishers such as what kind of articles people are looking at and how long or valuable their readers think the content is. This is important from publishing standpoint, because it gives you a better idea of your audience, and you can see areas that you wish to improve.
Overall, both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, but publishing for Apple News, using News Preview and the JSON framework seems to give publishers the most control over making their publication’s experience engaging. With that being said, because of the coding, and additional technical resources the beta version currently requires, it is not necessarily the best solution for people who 1) are not familiar with coding and 2) are concerned with getting articles out quickly. For this reason, while I think that one publishing platform will eventually surpass the other, the decision depends on your needs and goals as an organization, author, and the content to give your readers the information they need.
