Apple, Inc. is reportedly launching its first daily local newsletter for the Bay Area and is actively working to expand to other cities. The newsletter, similar to a daily newspaper, includes top stories from various segments such as local news, politics, sports, dining, and more.
Rather than relying on algorithms, all the stories are handpicked by Apple News editors from several publications like SP Gate, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakslanside, and Eater San Francisco. This will mitigate the recirculation of low-value content and click bait articles.
The announcement comes at a time when many tech companies offer newsletters as part of their services. Even social media behemoths have jumped on board, with Twitter acquiring Revue and Facebook launching Bulletin newsletters.
In the same context, Substack, a prominent newsletter platform, was valued at USD 650 million as part of its Series B funding, suggesting the anticipated market size of this media, which was hitherto just an old-school forum. This could also be attributed to a substantial reduction in the usability of newspaper websites.
Apple News regards the Bay Area newsletter as a go-to digest for locals to stay up to date on the most notable events in the area. Apart from the latest addition, its news aggregator platform currently overs local news across 11 cities, namely, Washington D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco, Houston, Bay Area, Miami, San Diego, New York, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and San Antonio.
With plans to expand the local news offerings to more cities, Apple is demonstrating that it intends to compete with other news aggregator services such as SmartNews and Flipboard, which cover and supply news in over a thousand cities across the United States.
Meanwhile, Google’s parent Alphabet has reported a 41% y-o-y jump in revenue to USD 257 billion in 2021, a new annual record for the company. Alphabet had reported USD 75.3 billion in revenue during Q4 2021 alone, a whopping 32% increase from the previous year.
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