Apple News: Getting Started

Apple News collects all the stories you want to read so that you no longer need to move from app to app to stay informed. It's the perfect news feed — customizable, easy to read, and addictive.

In this article, we're going to do a breakdown on how to treat content once you are in Apple News. If you want information on how to get accepted to Apple News, please take a look at this guide and this News Publisher sign up page.

What Is the Apple News Format?

Apple's News format is a custom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) document format that lets you create signature content for Apple News publishing. The most fascinating element of Apple News is how it structures the feed for each user into a personalized stream where the user can pick which topics they'd like to see and media publishers fill it.

What Layout Do I Have Out of the Box From RebelMouse?

We do our Apple News format using HTML markup (not markdown syntax, which is also an option), and this is roughly how the out-of-the-box version looks like:

If you'd like a more personalized version, please contact your account manager so we can discuss an implementation.

How Do I Start Publishing to Apple News?

1) Sign in to News Publisher

You can do so by going to http://www.icloud.com/newspublisher.

2) Provide publisher and channel information

You'll also need to provide additional information to set up your channel. When you're finished, click Next.

3) Upload a logo

You now have the option to upload a channel logo and cover image. (Note: You can skip this step.) Make sure your logo is a PNG file with a minimum size of 256 pixels square. The file size limit is 2 MB. Click here for more details about logo specifications.

The cover image appears in the Discover view in Apple News. You can find it in the Apple News Settings menu:

You can update your channel logo in the same Settings interface:

4) Choose a publishing format

Next, you can choose from two different publishing methods: RSS feed (there's no change in user experience, which means you can't use Apple's article format) or the Apple News format, which optimizes your content for iOS devices.

Please choose Apple News Format.

To use Apple's News format for your content, all you have to do is to click Sign Up for Apple News Format. Once you click the button, your application will automatically be sent in for review.

5) Submit articles for approval

After you're approved as a publisher, you're required to submit some articles for review. To do this, you can either create an article in News Publisher or use your existing content management system (CMS).

In RebelMouse, you can choose any of the articles you have already created and choose to submit them to Apple News. See below for more details.

In each case, Apple reviews your articles and notifies you as soon as your content is approved. After that, you can publish without further review.

6) Enter Apple News information into RebelMouse's Global Settings

You will need to insert Apple News API key, Apple News API secret, and Apple News channel id in your site's back end. You can find this information in your News Publisher account.

To do this, first navigate to our Layout & Design Tool, then go to Global Settings. Scroll down and enter the information:

How to Enable Apple News per Post From Entry Editor

When you add a new post or edit an existing one, you can choose whether to publish it to Apple News or not.

In Entry Editor, you'll find a tab on the right-hand side of the interface that says Social Copy. This is where you can find the toggle for Apple News.

If it's the first time you're publishing to Apple News, the content you choose to toggle on in Entry Editor will be sent for review. All articles will appear in your iCloud account and Apple will notify you once they are approved and good to go.

Guidelines for Content: What Is Okay to Publish in Apple News and What Isn't

Not all embeds are supported in Apple News. Here's a breakdown:

  • Facebook video embeds are not supported.
  • Facebook post embeds are supported.
  • YouTube embeds are supported, but please bear in mind that they are not included in Apple News's native analytics tracking.
  • Twitter embeds are supported.
  • Instagram post embeds are supported.
  • JW Player is partially supported. If you use our native integration, we can output it properly and track stats within Apple News for those videos. If you do not have it connected through our platform, it's possible it won't be supported by Apple's News format.
  • Ads in your articles that you may have added via our Ad Manager are not supported. (For more information on ads, please see below.)

Apple News's Native Stats

Please bear in mind that native stats in Apple News do not count video plays from third-party providers.

When you click on the videos section in the JW Player Admin Dashboard and scroll to the very bottom of the page, they say that " These metrics do not include videos hosted on third-party websites such as YouTube and Vimeo."

How to Monetize Apple News

Apple has their own ad campaign management tool called Workbench. For more information, please check out their guide here. After you've set up your ads in Workbench, please contact your account manager or support@rebelmouse.com so that we can make an update on our end. We can set ads frequency from 0–10 (with 0 being no ads, and 10 being the highest amount of ads). Please let us know what frequency you prefer.

After that, if you are new to Apple News, you should be all set to go. If you've been publishing to Apple News for a while and need to make sure this change takes effect on older posts, please let your account manager know. We will need to run a script, which may take about two hours of developer work for our team, to refresh the ads frequency on those already-published posts. Please note that RebelMouse does not have control over ad placements in Apple News.

content marketing

Why RebelMouse Is the Best Content Marketing Platform

RebelMouse is a unique platform and company. The company was founded on the vision that media companies would need an always-modern solution to thrive in the new connected internet, and that brands would have to behave like new media companies and use the same platforms.

Keep reading... Show less
creators

Why Premium Creative Agencies and CTOs Choose to Develop on RebelMouse vs. WordPress and Drupal

The Intersection of Design and Development: Where Your Clients Thrive

We started RebelMouse seven years ago knowing that there was a fundamental design flaw in the world of traditional CMSs: Every instance, on every platform, had to be updated independently. It's similar to an era when users had to manage their own Microsoft Exchange Server for email. The costs of managing, maintaining, and iterating on a CMS to keep it awesome and world class is typically a $10 million-a-year endeavor. But even then, these cost-prohibitive CMSs are still behind the times.

Keep reading... Show less
multivariate testing

Native Multivariate Testing at Scale With RebelMouse

What Differentiates Our Approach

There are many popular tools that allow you to perform experiments and A/B tests on your users — primarily Google Chrome Experiments and Optimizely. But all of these solutions are JavaScript additions to your web page that sidestep the problem of old, outdated, and clumsy CMSs. These solutions work by calling on a third-party JavaScript library that rewrites a page after it's rendered. This approach adds extra page weight and creates strange user experiences due to having to wait for everything to load and be rewritten on the fly.

At RebelMouse, we've solved this in a very elegant way. At the core level of our platform, we can natively render different layouts and track the exact differences in performance when comparing a test to your other layouts.

Keep reading... Show less
search engine optimization

The RebelMouse Approach to SEO

An SEO Strategy That Wins With Every Publish

How exactly Google determines search ranking largely remains a mystery for publishers, but what we do know is that the search engine continuously rolls out updates to its algorithm. And while sometimes these updates are small and nearly unnoticeable, other times they result in massive changes around the way Google crawls content, often disrupting the rankings of webpages all across the globe.

With each one of these algorithm changes comes a new approach to search strategy. It's a lot to keep up with in a competitive digital landscape. Publishers are already burdened with the task of creating high-performing quality content that's easy to find on Google and, in turn, easily shared across social. It's a job that can't be solved with advertising dollars either. It's estimated that nearly 80% of users disregard paid search results. Pair this with the fact that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search query and you're left with the realization that it's never been more important to prioritize search engine optimization.

The good news is that RebelMouse has a unique approach to SEO that leverages the tools available to us from the open web alongside our proprietary technology that enables users to win key phrases with every publish. The best part? The platform is designed to empower the people who live closest to content: writers and editors. Here's how it works.

Keep reading... Show less
creators

Modern E-Commerce: Blur the Line Between Content and Design

Create Modular + Reusable Design Patterns on RebelMouse

Content saturation is an industry-wide problem, and the e-commerce space is no exception given that it's filled with big brands, small Etsy stores, and everyone in between all fighting for similar audiences. The best way to fight this symptom is to understand your audience and provide them with what they want.

Keep reading... Show less
instagram-style e-commerce features on rebelmouse

Instagram-style E-commerce Features on RebelMouse

Revolutionizing e-commerce on RebelMouse

Whether you're a brand with a blog or a media company with a site, driving purchasing behavior and building an audience that uses your content to find things they love to buy is vital. We're very proud to have built out the same functionality that everyone is now used to on Instagram, with layovers on images that lead to products with attribution.

Keep reading... Show less
communities

Building Premium Communities and User Journeys on RebelMouse

RebelMouse is much more than just a replacement for a traditional CMS. Our platform is a tremendous community-building experience. Today's social ecosystem has given us a seemingly limitless number of premium creators who understand how to create gorgeous and relevant content that drives the growth of their own audiences. These creators and influencers are either experts in certain topics, or heavily engaged in targeted content that drives their interests. They're not only consuming the content they're passionate about, but they're contributing to the conversation, too. The new role of the editor is not just to cover the most important topics and people around their expertise, but also to invite those preferred influencers into their community and get them to participate in creating premium content.

Keep reading... Show less
creators

Dynamic Voting: Grow Traffic and Engagement Organically

Help your audience find its voice.

Creating quality content is no longer on marketers alone. We live in a universe of creators who are willing to not only consume content that resonates, but play a role in the creation, promotion, and conversations surrounding it.

Since the start of RebelMouse, we've been on a journey to create dynamic media that is easier for content creators to curate and amplify on social. It's why we've built an online engagement platform centered around the power of communities that thrive naturally in the digital ecosystem.

Keep reading... Show less
revenue

How to Monetize Your Website in Today’s Publishing Environment

In order to define distributive publishing, we have to ask the following question: If you have quality content, but nobody sees it, does it even exist? The answer is no, because your content needs to be supported in a way that lets it move seamlessly across all channels, especially site, search, and social. But let's take this question a step further: If you can't monetize your content to generate the support it needs, how do you create quality content in the first place?

Keep reading... Show less
page speed

Making Sense of PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals

Page speed and Core Web Vitals are an important piece of the SEO puzzle. Having a quick load time and passing Core Web Vitals are important factors in Google's search ranking and results. But there are multiple ways of testing your speed and vitals, and it can get very confusing to try and understand the results since different measuring tools can result in different scores.

Keep reading... Show less
monetization

Reach New Revenue Heights With RebelMouse’s Boost Spot Placement

Authentic sponsored content piques user interest and yields high rewards

Monetization has to be multifaceted. Publishers must deliver a site experience that makes the user a top priority without sacrificing the ability to generate ad revenue. After all, readers are no longer going to put up with irritating ad experiences that slow down their consumption of content. And since publishers can't rely on a few viral moments to make ends meet, successful ad campaigns must feel genuine and produce consistent returns to be effective.

The need for smart, sticky monetization methods is nothing new, but publishers and marketers alike are starting to perfect the modern ad experience better than ever before. This success is due in part to the increased use of sponsored content.

Sponsored content is the creation of content for a brand by a publisher — whether it's an article, video, listicle, or any other dynamic media — that is paid for by the brand. But here's the key: Sponsored content, when done correctly, is a valuable content experience that retains the same voice and integrity of the brand that's sponsoring the placement. This seamless integration into the natural flow of content that the publisher normally creates makes it one of the most effective ways to build site revenue. In fact, 80% of readers believe authentic content is the main factor that will drive them to follow or engage with a brand.

Keep reading... Show less
platform updates

RebelMouse Q2 2021 Platform Performance Updates

Q2 of 2021 was a big quarter for the open web. Google delayed their release of SEO ranking by CrUX report, and they changed their method for Lighthouse scoring drastically. Our team was a few steps ahead of these changes, and we were able to update our platform so sites in our network had little, if any, performance interruptions.

We invested over 1,592 hours into our platform in Q2 2021 alone, and all of the sites on our platform received the benefits of these updates. To break it down into large buckets, we invested in the following key areas:

  • 538 hours dedicated to new features
  • 725 hours dedicated to improving existing features
  • 329 hours dedicated to performance and infrastructure updates

Here are the major updates that we've added to the RebelMouse platform in Q2.

Keep reading... Show less
layout & design tool

How to Use the Pagination Element

You can add pagination to section, tag, and archive pages using RebelMouse's Layout & Design Tool. This can be done through our Pagination element:

Using the Properties card, there are three options that you can configure on the Pagination element:

Keep reading... Show less
Subscribe to Our Newsletter