Wired Releases A Story Early To Apple News Users; Wired Readers Not Happy

from the fragmenting-the-internet dept

As you may know, Apple last week released its new Apple News newsreader product. I don't have an iOS device, so I haven't checked it out, but the reviews I've heard have been fairly underwhelmed by the experience. Either way, Wired apparently decided (or did some sort of deal with Apple) to release a particular story as an "exclusive" on Apple News. The story was released last week, but you can only see it on Apple News. If you go to this URL on Wired before the story officially shows up on the web tonight, you get a blurb saying that it's only available on Apple news for now.

This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday, September 22nd. Please check this page again at that time.

Perhaps not that surprisingly, a lot of people are unhappy about this. Wired posted this to its Facebook feed and the comments are almost entirely negative.


Whaddya know? Turns out that creating arbitrary exclusives based on what platform people use (and, likely, which company paid you to keep your content exclusive to their platform) serves mainly to piss people off. People don't want a fragmented/fractured content experience. They don't want to be told that they can't read a story just because they don't have the "right" kind of phone. That's not the kind of internet the public wants, and it's a bit unfortunate that it's one that Wired has apparently decided to support.

Filed Under: apple news, exclusives, fragmentation, internet, platforms, wired
Companies: apple, conde nast, wired