The Apple News editorial team is made up of journalists who honed their craft at publications like The Times, Wall St Journal, CNN and Bleacher Report. Lauren Kern, former New York Magazine executive editor is Apple News’ editor in chief. She leads a team of around 30 people in London, New York, Sydney and Silicon Valley. Their job is to trawl hundreds of stories a day and decide which stories to feature in various areas of the app.
They control key areas of Apple News, including the stories that lead the app in the Top Stories feed, updated one story at a time on a rolling basis whenever the editors decide that a new story takes priority over another.
They also curate the news digest found in the Spotlight section; from features on current events to deep dives into a specific topic.
They curate Editorial Groups within the app. These are found within the ‘News Editors’ Picks’ tab.
They also curate the Top Videos section in the ‘Today’ view.
Outside the app, the team collaborates to assemble email newsletters that are circulated every weekend. They consist of five of the week’s top stories and aren’t limited to a single set of sources or topics.
Publishers may pitch their articles to Apple News’ editors for top placement consideration. However, consider that the platform’s editorial team receives hundreds of pitches a day on top of their core workload of exploring the platform for pieces of their own choosing to feature. Apple doesn’t give advice on getting a pitch read, but it will help a publisher’s pitch to be an authority on the topic they’re covering. That is, a publisher whose output reflects extensive coverage of and demonstrable expertise in a said topic, much like how a publication can earn domain authority on a topic in search engines if it publishes many articles on the topic of various perspectives.