Apple Articles — step 1….
Keeping it simple…
I’ll take you through the Manchester City Apple News channel, what it is, how we did it and what’s next.
For those unfamiliar with Apple articles, it’s basically a feed into the Apple News app. Publishers with newsworthy content, which will likely be on their website, apps, Facebook, Twitter etc, can also have it pushed into Apple’s own News app. Which is useful since this is where Apple would like you to consume all your news.
And it’s beautiful. I’m an avid Android user but I delight in seeing our articles clean and simple, served quickly.
Of course you can still get the latest news on our site — our mobile offering is also clean and simple might I add, though not as speedy, yet.
We want to make it easy for any user to consume our content.
How we got started
The process is relatively straight forward for a manual start.
You submit your link and logo, and publisher information — taking care to follow the guidelines closely for the logo — for approval to Apple News Publisher. The logo was rejected the first time I submitted — the crest wasn’t the same height as the Manchester City text.
Once Apple deem you news worthy, you can start adding in your articles. This took a couple of days.
We opted to use the API during the set up so we can access stats and have more control over the content that we feed out, or you can select RSS for a simple integration.
Rather than wait for the API to be implemented, which was looking like a few weeks away, or be drowned in all the articles via RSS, we got stuck in using the basic article editor.
When I say basic…I mean basic.
You can add an image and headline, blurb and author. In the body you can add a pull quote, bold, italic and a link. That’s it. No video, galleries, social embeds. I personally enjoy the simplicity of it, quick, graceful, effective — but if you’re looking to add more to your articles, you’ll have to get your API skills out.
Facebook provides mark up for their Instant Articles even in manual entry. It looks scary to some of our content editors, but does allow us to create media rich articles prior to any integration.
This simple interface is useful for those wishing to test the waters, or get something out quickly, as we did. We also wanted to explore how it would work with our internal workflow and content, without having to invest too much time building the API out from the CMS.
Copy and paste the content in, add the links, upload an image and then you hit Publish. All very simple.
There are options to update the channel details and imagery. I also created a couple of sections to get us started, What the Media Says (our popular media round up) and Matches to cover match news.
The manual set up isn’t too time consuming, a few minutes from the article being on the site, I can have it in our Apple News channel.
I’m currently not publishing everything into the channel, ticket and travel news for example, and not all our Women’s and EDS news is in there. This will come once we’re automated along with richer content articles.
Step 2…
So we have a channel, what’s next?
Well we’ll soon have a broader offering on the News app as we integrate the Apple News API to our Sitecore XP content management system.
This will push most of the news, including embedded videos, galleries and social posts, into the news publisher for us to finesse before publishing, reducing the resource overhead. I’ll report back once we’re up and running.
A week in and I’m pleased with the channel. The figures are low, I’ve not pushed it on anything other than the @ManCityDigital Twitter account, but will be adding buttons and links to our other channels shortly.
Will this impact our site statistics? Possibly. It’s too early to tell. But my hope is that we’ll reach more people and fans with the great content we have, who wouldn’t normally venture to the site to view it.
