Apple SVP Eddy Cue laid out the company’s vision for Apple News in an interview with CNN, touting the app as more of a public service than a money-making venture. Cue said Apple is working hard to steer clear of the economics of the news business, focusing more on building the platform for news organizations to leverage on their own. While Apple offers to sell the ads that display next to content—claiming 30 percent of the revenue for ad space it sells—the company also gives publishers the ability to sell their own ads and keep 100 percent of the profits.
(It’s unclear how many news organizations sell their own ads, and how many rely on Apple at this point.) Cue said the app aims to clear away hurdles that keep publications from delivering content to consumers. “News organizations today have lots to worry about: Each of them has to worry about building their own apps, the interfaces, the user experience,” Cue said. “This gives them an opportunity to focus on what they do really well, which is the journalism part, and let us handle the technology piece of building the apps and distributing them.”
Cue emphasized that the company has no plans to employ journalists of its own and is more interested in expanding the app’s existing capabilities to new markets like China in the near future.
Despite well-documented censorship concerns faced by news groups under China’s government, Cue said the company hasn’t encountered any problems operating there because it knows how to work with the Communist nation. “We follow the laws of the countries that we are in and we’ll work with the local news organizations and the international news organizations that are available in China,” Cue said. Since the app just provides access to the news sources users select, Apple’s focus seems to be less on what people read and more on how they read it.
