Back in the fall I started to have an issue with Apple News. I went from seeing hundreds of readers per day to almost zero. I couldn’t figure it out for a long time, and I had just assumed that I no longer satisfied the desires of the Apple News algorithm. Despite seeing literally zero hits on some days, I still kept auto-posting to Apple News.

Then Eric Young reached out to me on Twitter to let me know that there was a problem with my channel. See, I use a WordPress extension to post my stuff to Apple News and it had been working great for a couple years, but apparently iOS 11 made something not work quite right and my posts weren’t getting assigned “categories” on Apple News.

I tried my best, but the nothing solved my problem until the dev updated the plugin¹. Everything seems to be working right now, thank god.

But since none of my posts on Apple News were getting in front of people, I turned off the auto-publish feature of the plugin. Since I was getting essentially zero traffic from Apple News, it didn’t make any difference at all to me, but I was a little bummed by not posting somewhere that I knew at least some people read my work.

Even after the recent update that fixed the issue I was having, I still don’t have auto-publish turned on, though. I was reminded that Apple News is not the same as a blog. A blog in the traditional sense is something people go to on a regular basis. Your understanding of one thing I post is informed by the other things I have written in the past. That’s not generally how Apple News works.

As such, I have kept auto-publish turned off and am now manually determining when an article is worth posting to Apple News. It’s not all the time, it’s more often when I have something I feel is worth sharing with a wider audience. This is not always the case with things I post to this site. Because this is a blog, sometimes I post personal things here or smaller things that I have no intention of “going viral” and those posts just belong on the blog.

I shall do my best to publish things promptly to Apple News for those who follow me there (and for those rare times I “crack the algorithm”), but it’s going to be a conscious choice from now on, not the default. A blog is not an Apple News channel, and I think I finally understand that.