Apple News is introducing its first daily local newsletter for the Bay Area and is actively exploring expanding the offering to other cities. The Bay Area daily local newsletter, which is reminiscent of a daily local paper, includes tops stories across local news, sports, politics, dining and more. The stories are compiled from numerous publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Gate, Eater San Francisco, KQED, The Oaklandside and others.
All of the stories included in the newsletter are curated by Apple News editors, as opposed to being selected by algorithms — a decision that should cut down on the recirculation of clickbait and other low-value content. Apple News considers the Bay Area newsletter to be a local’s end-of-day digest that includes notable news and other information about what’s happening around them. The daily local newsletter joins Apple News’ daily newsletter that delivers national news to larger audiences.
The launch arrives at a time when a number of tech companies are adding on newsletters as part of their offerings, including Twitter with its acquisition of Revue and Facebook’s newsletter platform Bulletin, for example. Top newsletter platform Substack was also valued at $650 million as of its Series B, indicating the sizable market for this more old-school form news media, that’s at least partially arisen due to the declining usability of newspapers’ websites.
If Apple chooses to roll out more daily local newsletters, it will have several markets to choose from. Today, Apple News offers local news coverage in 11 markets including San Francisco, the Bay Area, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Miami, Charlotte, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. Apple says it plans to launch its local news feature in more cities in the future.
The tech giant’s local news offerings indicate that it’s looking to further compete with other news aggregator services such as Flipboard and SmartNews, which offer local news coverage in thousands of U.S. cities.
