Apple and Facebook lock horns; But are they saying the same thing?
The 72Point report on media consumption released last week concluded with one sweeping statement: Forget Citizen Journalism; Generation Editor is the next big thing.
And, as if by magic, tech giant Apple has put the proof in the pudding by launching a news app that puts the distribution of news directly into the hands of the consumer.
Yesterday at the Worldwide Developers Conference Apple announced the release of Apple News, a Flipboard-esque curator of news, in its iOS 9 rollout. The launch follows Facebook Instant Articles, which speeds the process of loading news articles on the social network and is tipped to transform the way users consume news.
Apple News is set to work in a similar way. Like Instant Articles it will include articles specifically built for the app, but it can also pull in content from elsewhere on the internet. Susan Prescott, vice president of product marketing, told delegates at the conference that the app will segment the latest stories, articles and posts into over a million topics in order to put the consumer in charge.
Like the streaming platform Spotify, which is entirely predicated on preference, readers will be able to follow all their favourite news sources as well as using search to discover new sources. Effectively, this makes consumers agents in the media cycle, choosing who to follow based on the content they’re most keen on receiving.
It is a shift that is already grounded on social media. According to the Generation Editor report, almost a quarter of people say they have friends or follow people who they regard as authorities for news and almost one in five (19 per cent) say they trust their friends to source news. The average time we wait before unfollowing or unfriending a news source we no longer find useful is 22.3 days, which underscores how we have evolved to minimise the amount of superfluous content heading our way.
Device preference is also an increasingly focal topic. A massive 95 per cent of people now consume media on multiple devices, with smartphones (62 per cent) the most popular device, followed by laptops (57 per cent), tablets (39 per cent) and desktops (33 per cent). Apple’s news app includes a new “news format” that caters to our desire for multi-platform content by allowing for custom fonts, multi-touch gestures and layouts that scale from phones to tablets.
Whether Facebook and Apple’s new apps will take off is still to be seen, Apple is months away from having a final product which means the consumer experience is still being developed. But the move signifies a big shift in distribution from individual publishers to apps that offer a blend of their content tailored to consumer preference.
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