Apple News launches its first daily local newsletter for the Bay Area and is actively exploring expanding to other cities. Resembling a local newspaper, the Bay Area’s daily local newsletter features top stories on 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 featured in the newsletter are curated by Apple News editors rather than being chosen by algorithms — a decision that should limit reuse of clickbait and other low-value content. Apple News views the Bay Area newsletter as a local’s daily digest, containing notable news and other information about what’s happening around them. The daily local newsletter complements Apple News’ daily newsletter, which delivers national news to a larger audience.
The launch comes at a time when a number of tech companies are adding newsletters as part of their offerings, including Twitter with its acquisition of the revue and Facebook’s newsletter platform Bulletin, for example. The top newsletter platform was Substack also valued at $650 million Series B onwards, which indicates the sizeable market for this rather old-fashioned news media that has arisen, at least in part, as a result of the declining usability from newspaper pages.
If Apple decides to roll out more daily local newsletters, it has multiple markets to choose from. Today, Apple News offers local coverage in 11 markets, including San Francisco, the Bay Area, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Miami, Charlotte, San Antonio and Washington, DC Additional cities will offer local news in the future .
The tech giant’s local news offerings suggest it may continue to work with other news aggregator services such as flipboard and SmartNews, providing local coverage in thousands of US cities.
