What’s the best approach to delivering news to your Apple Watch? (Poll) ~ Apple Juice

Tuesday 21 April 2015

What’s the best approach to delivering news to your Apple Watch? (Poll)

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Re/code has an interesting look at the three different approaches major news organizations are taking to their Apple Watch apps.

The New York Times will dispatch one-sentence stories that answer the question, “Hey, did you hear?” in a conversational tone. The Washington Post will pick one story — say, an article about the end of tipping — and storyboard it like a movie or TV show, using a combination of graphics, images and text to adapt it for the 38 mm (or 42 mm) screen. CNN will let people personalize their news feeds by picking from among a dozen topics and choosing how they’d like to be notified (a tap on the wrist or no?).

News organizations weren’t particularly quick to adapt to the Internet, trying to stick to their existing business models in the face of rapidly-changing consumer behaviour, but this time the major players believe they are ready …

Andrew Phelps, senior product manager for the NY Times, said that a special team began working on a watch app as soon as Apple released the WatchKit SDK.

The watch comes at a really interesting time for us. It comes right at the moment that mobile is truly becoming, if not the most important platform, certainly a first class citizen.

CNN’s Chief Product Officer Alex Wellen said that mobile devices already account for almost half their traffic, so the watch was an obvious next step.

It’s important to go to the user – no longer can we ask them to come to us.

Cory Haik, executive producer and senior editor of digital news at The Washington Post, said that the company would learn by experimenting.

Nobody knows what storytelling is going to look like on the watch. We wanted to be among the first to experiment with it.

Which of the three approaches do you expect will be right for you? Take our poll and let us know your views in the comments, then check out our running list of notable Apple Watch apps already ready for you before Friday’s launch.