INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess
journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild and exaggerate anything — no matter how awful, obnoxious or
untrue.
‘Fakebook& eat your heart out.
Apple says human curation is not a new direction for Apple News — describing it as a &guiding
principle& across the product since it launched three years ago.
Although it certainly wasn&t shouting so loudly about it back then when
algorithmic feeds were still riding high.But the company says Apple News has always had a team of editors — which it says are focused on
&discovering and spotlighting well-sourced fact-based stories to provide readers with relevant, reliable news and information from a wide
range of publishers&.
Those &experienced& editors are also now being put to work assessing political reportage and commentary around the US
With only publishers they deem to be &reliable& getting to be political sources for Apple News.
The launch is focused on theUS 2018 midterm
elections, at least initially, which will get a dedicated section in the product — providing what Cupertino bills as&timely, trustworthy
midterm election information& along with &the most important reporting and analysis from a diverse set of publishers&.
We&ve asked the
company whether it plans to expand the Apple News election section approach to other markets.
&Today more than ever people want information
from reliable sources, especially when it comes to making voting decisions,& said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News, in a statement
&An election is not just a contest; it should raise conversations and spark national discourse
By presenting quality news from trustworthy sources and curating a diverse range of opinions, Apple News aims to be a responsible steward of
those conversations and help readers understand the candidates and the issues.&
Apple is clearly keen to avoid accusations of political
bias — hence stressing the section will include a &diverse range of opinions&, with content being sourced from the likes of Fox News, Vox,
the Washington Post, Politico and Axios, plus other unnamed publishers.
Though there will equally clearly be portions of the political
spectrum who decry Apple News& political output as biased against them — and thus akin to political censorship.
Safe to say, don&t expect
But as any journalist worth their salt will tell you, you can&t please all the people all of the time
And not trying to do so is essentially a founding tenet of the profession
It also why algorithms suck at being editors.
The launch of a dedicated section for an election event within Apple news product is clearly a
response to major failures where tech platforms have intersected with political events — at least wherebusiness models rely on fencing
content at vast scale and thus favor algorithmic curation (with all the resulting clickbaity, democracy-eroding pitfalls that flow from
that).
Concern about algorithmic impacts on democratic processes continues to preoccupy politicians and regulators in the US and beyond.And
while it fair to say that multiple tech platforms have a fake news and political polarization problem, Facebook has been carrying the
biggest can here, given how extensively Kremlin agents owned its platform during the 2016 US presidential elections.
Since then the company
has announced a raft of changes intended to combat this type of content — including systems to verify political advertisers; working with
third party fact checkers; closing scores of suspect accounts around elections; and de-emphasizing news generally in its News Feed in favor
of friends& based updates which are harder for malicious agents to game at scale.
But its core algorithmic approach to programming the
hierarchies of content on its platform has not changed.
And while it ramping up the number of content moderation and safety staff on its
books — saying it will have 20,000 people working on that by the end of this year — that still reactive content assessment; which is the
polar opposite of editorial selection and curation.
So Apple evidently sees an opportunity for its News product to step in and fill the
trust gap with reliable political information.
As well as general news and commentary from the selected trusted publishers, Apple says it
will also include &special features with stories curated by Apple News editors from trusted publishers&, including opinion columns &about
hot-button issues that are intended to offer readers a full range of ideas and debate about important subjects, from news sources they may
not already follow& (so it also taking aim at algorithmically generated filter bubbles); and an election dashboard from the Washington Post
— which contextualizes &key data like current polling, what pundits are saying and survey data on voter enthusiasm&.
Local news is another
focus for the section, with a feature that aims to highlight &quality reporting about issues that matter to local constituents on the most
important races&.
The 2018 Midterm Elections section is available to Apple News users in the US from now until November.
