From a consumer perspective, Apple News is a platform that hasn’t completely convinced me yet. I still open the WSJ app more often than I do the Apple News app. But as a publisher, I was intrigued and decided to get my feet wet with Apple’s publishing platform.
To sign up as a publisher everything you need is an Apple ID and a logo that follows Apple’s guidelines. Once you have signed up you can choose between two publishing formats:
RSS: convenient if you already own a blog with an RSS feed. New posts get automatically added to your Apple News channel when you post them on your blog. While easy to setup, it has some limitations (see comparison chart below).
Apple News Format (ANF): with this native format you get everything Apple News has to offer. You can publish either using Apple’s News Publisher or directly out of your Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, using a plugin.
Getting Started With Apple News
To get started on Apple News, sign in to iCloud.com and take the following steps:
Go to www.icloud.com/#newspublisher
Enter publisher information
Setup a channel
Upload a logo (make sure it’s in PNG format with transparent background)
Choose publishing format (RSS or Apple News Format)
I started with RSS as the publishing format to get my blog content on Apple News quickly, while figuring out what ANF had to offer and how content creation worked.
If you too choose RSS, you have to provide your RSS feed(s) on the next screen and finally accept Apple’s Terms & Conditions before submitting the application.
Apple will review your publisher and channel information before your content will be available on Apple News. My channel was approved within 24 hours.
RSS vs Apple News Format
One of the reasons why I never fully caught on to Apple News was, that many articles I read where not in Apple News Format. Instead, they were excerpts published to Apple News via RSS. As a result, only one part of the article was shown in the Apple News app. To read the full article, I had to click a “Read Full Story” link (or swipe up), which rendered the article in Safari. That just wasn’t a good reading experience.
The RSS feed of my blog has full articles, so the reading experience in Apple News is actually good. Nevertheless, I wanted to offer the very best reading experience to my audience and differentiate myself from many other blogs that go the easy (RSS) route.
ANF Publishing Options
You can publish in Apple News Format either directly in Safari, through News Publisher or via a plugin, through WordPress. To avoid duplicate work, I decided to publish directly from WordPress using the Publish to Apple News plugin.
WordPress Plugin
The Publish to Apple News plugin uses an API to publish to Apple News. Until recently Apple’s API had limitations around images contained in articles. As a result, the plugin had to bundle both text and images into a single blob before publishing it via the API to Apple News. Unfortunately, that approach was error prone because it relied on PHP functions that many hosting providers disabled for security reasons. One example of such a required function was allow_url_fopen. I couldn’t get publishing to work neither on my blog, hosted by Flywheel, nor on WordPress I installed locally on my Mac.
I would get the following error message:
There has been an error with the API. Please make sure your API settings are correct and try again: The attachment 1×1.trans.gif could not be included in the request because its size was 0.
Fortunately, the Apple News API now supports remote image fetching. As a result, the plugin only has to submit image URLs and Apple News fetches them directly from the remote host. After updating to the latest version of the plugin, which supports remote image fetching, I was ready to publish directly from WordPress.
But then I ran into another snag:
There has been an error with the API. Please make sure your API settings are correct and try again: INVALID_DOCUMENT
According to the Apple News API Reference, INVALID_DOCUMENT indicates that the JSON in the Apple News Format document (article.json) is invalid. To see what part of the JSON file was giving me troubles, I downloaded News Preview and the JSON file using the Apple News menu in WordPress.
News Preview requires Xcode and Java to be installed on your Mac. Before I could preview the JSON file, I had to rename it to article.json because News Preview wouldn’t recognize article–60238.json for whatever reason.
After loading the article, I noticed that News Preview had issues parsing URLs pointing to images:
Error: Could not read image data at URL [http://www.michaelkummer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/baby-bottle-nipple.jpg]
Interestingly, copy/pasting the URL into Safari, opened the image without any issues. After some trial and error, I figured out that CloudFlare’s Browser Integrity Check caused the issue and I disabled it through a page rule.
CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network, that protects and accelerates websites and I use it for my blog.
News Publisher
News Publisher is similar to the WordPress editor and it is very easy to use. To get started, select an article template (header style), enter a title, an optional subtitle and an optional Author name. Then type or paste the article content.
That’s when you realize how limited News Publisher is. For starters, it offers only very limited formatting options, including:
Bold or italic
Pull quote
3 text styles: Basic, Modern or Classic
Link
Images with caption
The one formatting option I missed most were bullet points but I worked around that by using “-“. What was even more annoying was that content pasted into News Publisher was plain text without any formatting whatsoever. Not even links were retained. In my article about fat and cholesterol I have a lot of links to sources, studies and statistics and adding them back in manually was a pain in the butt. Needless to say, I had to re-upload all images manually as well.
All issues combined, make publishing through News Publisher not a very attractive but a time-consuming option. Unless, Apple News is your primary publishing platform.
I Gave Up on Apple News Format
When I started writing this article mid of May, I was determined to publish in ANF but over the past couple of days I realized just how difficult this would be.
After having spent hours troubleshooting my environment to make publishing out of WordPress work, I gave up. It’s just too cumbersome and time-consuming for a blogger like I am. As much as I wanted to use Apple News Format to deliver the best user experience possible, the following issues kept me from pursing that route:
JSON files the WordPress plugin produced didn’t contain any images
Publishing to Apple News kept failing with an INVALID_DOCUMENT error despite that the JSON file (without images) previewed fine in News Preview
I had to disable CloudFlare for certain parts of my webpage
For a moment I considered setting up a separate WordPress instance on my Mac to publish from there but copying articles back and forth from my main blog is just too cumbersome. As a result, I filed a support ticket with Apple to switch my channel back to RSS. Maybe Apple will announce improvements to its platform at this years’ Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) that make me reconsider.
To find my channel in Apple News, simply access this link from a device running iOS 9 or later.
More Resources
News Publisher Resources and Support
News Publisher Help
Advertising Guide
News Preview
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