When news publishers have a big story these days, their editors jump on Slack and pitch it to an unlikely partner: Apple. The tech company has built a small but powerful news team that is making Apple a key distribution outlet for news publishers.
From the pitch received via a dedicated Slack channel, Apple’s editorial team of about a dozen staffers in the U.S. decides what story gets featured at the top of the app or to the left of the home screen. That can yield a flood of traffic for publishers. Apple News has generated half of Vox.com’s daily traffic at times, according to a person familiar with Vox’s numbers. An executive at the website of a major TV network said Apple News has accounted for as much as 60% of traffic for some stories.