Thread by @jbenton

My Quest to Find @voxdotcom’s New Apple News+ Vertical: A UX Parable in ∞ Parts

(1/∞)

I like Vox! It’s a smart site with smart ideas about editorial strategy. So when I heard a new product from them, “The Highlight by Vox,” would be included in Apple News+, I was interested! But then I tried to find it, and that was my big mistake.

So first I go to the News+ tab in Apple News. There’s a catalog of all News+’s offerings there. Is it under “H”? No. (Lots of Highlights for kids, though.) Under “V”? No. “News & Politics”? No.

Maybe I should just scroll through the long News+ feed. I spy the @WSJ, also part of News+, but I go from top to bottom — no Vox of Highlight.

The main News tab maybe? Nope.

I figured I’d search for it. There’s...no search field in the News+ tab. And none in the main News tab. Ah, but there’s on in Following?

But there’s nothing for The Highlight, and searching for Vox only shows its main UN-PREMIUM page. Egads, must I live among the commoners? Ugh.

On the main Vox page, I scroll through all the verticals in the little carousel up top — no The Highlight.

I scroll through all the stories from the past couple weeks, hoping something would be flagged as ~PREMIUM~. No dice.

I decide to take to Twitter. A first search seems to indicate no one has talked about the damned thing in a week.

But then I see it! A tweet from Vox writer @constancegrady linking to an Apple News URL. FINALLY!

I tap it, it opens a webview, throws up a modal, and BOOM I’m in.

I see a story! It looks good!

I see a The Highlight logo mid-article and think it might lead me to the mothership. Alas, it’s just an image.

I tap on @constancegrady’s byline hopefully too. But it goes to her web author page, which doesn’t list the story I’m on.

But wait! If I scroll down to the end of the story, I see three other Vox stories recommended — and two of them are marked “SUBSCRIPTION”! Eureka! I tap on the first one.

Oops.

I tap on the second one, and it opens! But — and I cast no aspersions on author @atrupar here — it doesn’t seem all that...premium? It’s the sort of look-at-this-dumb-video aggregation piece you can find easily on Vox and pretty much everywhere else webby.

And indeed, it’s just a regular ol’ web story, free on the web, somehow mislabeled as subscriber-only. vox.com/2019/4/4/18295…

I go back to the main Vox page and...holy moly there’s @constancegrady’s story again. Just sitting there! Unmarked as premium!

Is it possible I’ve been having ~premium experiences~ my entire life and JUST NOT KNOWN ABOUT IT??

I looked back at @constancegrady’s tweet — she, my unknowing Virgil through these circles of Apple News+ — and I see her reply for the first time. It’ll all be free in a week anyway.

Oh well.

If there’s a serious future-of-News point to be made here, it’s that Apple News+’s structuring itself around print magazine issues makes it hard to fit in, well, anything else sensibly. I wrote about that here the day of the event: niemanlab.org/2019/03/apple-…

But the real point is: It shouldn’t be this damned hard to find a product you both want to track down *and* are paying for. /end

Update: I fully expected the last tweet in this thread to be “Duh, my thanks to @randomvoxemployee for showing me this easy way to get to it.”

But 4 hours later, nothing.

The inescapable conclusion is that The Highlight is a figment of Eddy Cue’s imagination.