Apple News Finally Expands Curated Local News Coverage Into Canada

Three years after Apple News first appeared in Canada, the company is now bringing its curated local news coverage to two Canadian cities: Toronto and Montreal.

While Apple News is arguably one of the company’s least popular services — especially in its paid form, Apple News+, which requires a $9.99 monthly subscription — the local news aspect remains part of the free tier of the service. This offers value to every iPhone, iPad, and Mac user — even those who don’t pay for a single one of Apple’s services.

To be fair, the inclusion of local content in Apple News isn’t anything novel, as many of the publications that offer their content through the aggregation service already provide lots of local coverage for their respective areas. In fact, one of the biggest Canadian Apple News partners is The Toronto Star.

What Apple’s local coverage offers is curated news, aggregated on a single page for those readers who want to only focus on topics of interest to their own regions. Apple began offering this nearly two years ago in iOS 13.6 for several U.S. locations, although it also had to bring on several more local news services to round out its content.

In the U.S., local news coverage also promised to not just focus on the big players, but bring together a variety of locally focused specialty topics such as sports, dining, entertainment, and local politics.

A ‘Local News Experience’

As with other services like Apple Music, the company focuses on using human curation rather than computer algorithms. For Apple News, this means that local coverage will be provided by local editors who can provide a true local news experience.

In other words, this isn’t just Apple’s systems searching for the words “Toronto” in news articles and collecting them all on a single page. There’s actually a team of news editors behind the scenes who are working to highlight the best articles, offering a good cross-section of local interest stories, and also avoiding the kind of repetition you’d otherwise see when multiple news agencies are covering the same event.

This human curation also brings smaller local news agencies into the mix. For example, in Toronto, readers will see articles not only from expected sources like The Toronto Star, CTV News, and Global News, but also Narcity, Now Magazine, blogTO, Toronto Life, and more.

Much like reading a local newspaper, articles are also divided into common sections of interest, such as News & Politics, Sports, and Food & Drink.

While most of the content is freely available, Apple is also mixing in a few Apple News+ pieces that will require a subscription; however, these are clearly labelled with a prominent “?News+” banner right above the headline.

Although only Toronto and Montreal are on board so far, it’s probably safe to say that more cities will be coming soon. As we noted earlier, the coverage is already on Apple News, so the challenge really is finding editorial staff to curate it on an ongoing basis to keep the local pages fresh and relevant.

However, it also appears that Apple has bigger plans for Apple News in Canada. For instance, it’s currently looking for a Lead Canadian Editor for Apple News, based out of either Toronto or Montreal. According to the job description, this will involve building relationships with publisher partners and building and leading a “small team of editors” in “curation efforts around a number of key content categories.”