Close

Request a Proposal

Copyright © RebelMouse 2020

Follow Us:

Apple News: Getting Started

"Apple News collects all the stories you want to read — so you no longer need to move from app to app to stay informed."

Apple News is the perfect news feed -- customizable, easy to read and addictive.

Here, we want to do a break down 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 News Format is the custom JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) document format that lets you create signature content for News publishing.
The most fascinating element of Apple News is how it structures the feed for each user -- a personalized stream where the user can pick which topics and media publishers fill it.



What layout do I have out of the box from RebelMouse?

We do our Apple News Format with 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 personalised version please contact your Account Manager so we can discuss implementation.


What do I need to provide RebelMouse to make it work?

You need to provide us with your Key ID, Secret and Channel ID, which you can find in your News Publisher account.

Once we have that we can input that in our backend and you'll be ready to go on Apple News!

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 2MB. 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:

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 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 that, you can either create an article in News Publisher or use your existing content management system (CMS).

In the RebelMouse DCMS, 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 info into Global Settings

You will need to insert Apple News API key, Apple News API secret, and Apple News channel id in your site's backend.

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


How to enable Apple News per post from the 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 the Entry Editor, you'll find a tab on the right that says Social Copy. There you can find the toggle on/off button for Apple News.

If it's the first time you publish to Apple News, the content you choose to toggle ON in the Entry Editor will be sent for review. All articles will appear on 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, a breakdown below:

- FB video embeds are not supported.

- Facebook post embeds are supported.

- Youtube embeds are supported, but please bear in mind that are not included in Apple News' native metric tracking.

- Tweet embeds are supported too.

- Instagram post embeds can also be used because they 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 the Apple News format.

- Ads in your articles that you may have added via the Ad Manager are not supported. (for more information on ads please see below)

Apple News' Native Stats

Please bear in mind that Apple News' native stats do not count video plays from 3rd party providers.

When you click on the videos section in the JW Player Admin Dashboard and scroll to the very bottom, they mention: "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 monetization and ad setup, Native Ads.
For more information please check out their guide here.

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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.

Read our deck here...

Keep reading...
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...
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...

No More Website Updates: Publish Like It’s the 2020s

These are the next-gen updates you need to stay ahead of the competition

Content creation is still the most powerful engine that propels every publisher forward. But in 2020 and beyond, quality content won't sustain a site on its own. The modern content lifecycle hinges on a number of things working together in unison — including page speed, intelligent SEO, and effective distribution, just to name a few.

However, there's one thing that can throw a wrench in the entire system, and that's platform updates. Whether you're publishing on a common CMS solution like WordPress, using a custom in-house CMS, have access to a dedicated team of developers, or any option in between, platform updates can be both costly and frustrating.

Keep reading...
women in tech

RebelMouse CEO: Reimagining Diversity “Starts in the Office”

Why women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community will restructure workplace norms

Entering a new decade means a new opportunity to change how we approach diversity. In a joint interview alongside Leanne Pittsford of Lesbians Who Tech, RebelMouse founder and CEO Andrea Breanna said that the only way to fight patriarchal dominance is to encourage and nurture more women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community in the workplace, particularly in tech.

Over half of RebelMouse's employees are women or identify as LGBTQ. Read our full diversity and inclusion report here.

Check out the full video below.

Related Articles

google news

Publishers No Longer Have to Submit Their Site to Google News

Google's Publisher Center creates new opportunities for audience growth

Just before the start of the next decade, Google announced an important change to its Google News offering with the launch of Google Publisher Center. The new interface merges Google News Producer and Google News Publisher into one to streamline the partnership process for publishers.

Overall, the change should make it easier for publishers to manage their Google News settings, including updating themes, directing URLs to section pages, and configuring user permissions. Read the full list of features here.

Keep reading...
remote work

How to Find Work-Life Balance as a Remote Employee

Tips from our CEO on making the most of an office-free lifestyle

Working from home is becoming increasingly popular, with an estimated 66% of companies now allowing remote work and 16% operating completely office-free. RebelMouse is one of those fully remote companies, and over the years we've mastered how to stay close to each other despite being spread across more than a dozen countries. We believe working remotely is good for both our personal lives and our productivity. Read more about this here.

Still, working free from the shackles of an office environment doesn't mean every day is a dance party in your pajamas from 9 to 5. Working from home comes with its own set of challenges just like any other job.

Keep reading...
Subscribe to Our Newsletter