Stressing user privacy, Apple offers a monthly news bundling service

The tech company seeks to become the Spotify of online reporting, a potential boon to digital journalism—and, by extension, PR pros. Publishers’ buy-in looms as a pivotal variable.

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A healthy digital ecosystem for journalists is crucial for PR pros—and now Apple is offering a lifeline to the struggling industry.

As newsrooms have shrunk and PR pros’ ranks have multiplied, it has become more and more difficult to get earned media for your organization or client. However, those media mentions carry precious weight in an era of cratering public trust and concerns about authenticity in online messaging.

Amid that context, Apple plans to offer a subscription service that would bundle many print magazines and a couple of newspapers into a single offering—all while putting a premium on user privacy.

The move is styled after services such as Spotify and Apple Music, which offer songs and albums to users for a low monthly fee. Revenue sharing from these services has been credited with saving the music industry, though record labels don’t make nearly as much money as they did before the rise of the internet.

Will the new deal from Apple help or hurt the publishing industry—and how much participation from key players will there be?

NBC News reported:

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