Apple News Renderer / Source

[tim-evans]

Our brands use Apple News as a distribution, and we have expertise in publishing to Apple News. We have a service at Condé Nast that supports this, and I'm interested in outlining a more holistic approach to Apple News that provides better support for folks.

From a high level, I'd like to provide the following:

• Rendering an Apple News article.json that can be sent to Apple for use on the News app.
• Previewing an Apple News article.json using a React application by leveraging atjson's React renderer.
• Importing an Apple News article.json so there can be rich preview (and eventual addition / manipulation) using atjson

I played around with type definitions for the Apple News Format, and ended up creating a programmatically generated type definition file from Apple's own documentation, which can be found in this gist. The code used to generate this file can be found here.

Using these definitions, we can create annotations for the Apple News format. I recommend that the renderer and source for Apple News use the same annotations. This means that if you want to render to Apple News, you should convert your schema into the Apple News annotations.

At a high level, I expect us to have annotations for Components and the AricleDocument. There's some additional parsing for handling inline formatting provided by HTML or markdown, which is fairly minimal (bold, italic, strikethrough, links, and a few others).

We can then use the React renderer to render a facsimile of how the article would appear on the News app. This would involve a bunch of work building out components for Apple News. For our teams at Condé, it would be very beneficial, because they can preview their content as it would (approximately) appear on Apple News before publishing or sending it to Apple.

In addition, they would be able to catch errors with the document because the preview would using the same toolchain as our service delivering the article.json to Apple.

The goal here is to:

• streamline work at Condé
• provide Apple News specific capabilities to enrich / customize content
• provide great tools that other editorial teams can benefit from

[tim-evans]

See https://github.com/CondeNast/atjson/tree/apple-news