Using the Mac News App Even If You Don't Like News

You can use the News app as a customized article feed only from sources you want to see. So instead of reading about world news, politics or finance, you can make it your tech news, science news or entertainment news app.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the News App, even if you're not into news. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
So your Mac comes with an App called News. In it you can read news from various different sources. Now you may have ignored that app because maybe you're not into reading news. But note that you can highly customize the News App to only show articles from sources that you want to see. So you don't have to see world news or political news or anything like that. You can customize it to see only news for a specific topic. Like, for instance, if you're just into tech news or science news or maybe entertainment news you can specifically just see that in the News App and nothing else. This could make the News App useful even if you're not into reading news. 
So to do this you want to do a couple of things. When you first use the News App, if you haven't used it before, then you're just going to see some top stories from various different sources and you're going to see a bunch of things on the Sidebar including suggestions. Now if you want to turn this into a customized news reader that only shows news from specific sources then what you need to do first is go to News and then Settings. The first item here is Restrict stories in Today. So the Today section you can see here on the left. If you turn this On it's only going to show you stories from channels that you follow. If you have this Off what it is going to do is suggest stories. Now you can still customize things from there by Liking stories or just Disliking stories and then it will show you more or less of that kind of story. So you can definitely go that route. But if you do this then it is not going to show you things unless you specifically select those sources. 
So now that we have that turned On let's get some sources here. You can see here that Following I just have Apple News Spotlight. So let me Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, on that and Unfollow that. Now I'm going to add some more here by doing a Search. So let's say I just want to follow tech news having to do with Apple. Let's search for Apple and I'm going to then see stuff that appears on the right. There's a Top Result, there's a topic called Apple. There's some Stories from today. More Topics and then Channels. This is where I want to look. I want to click on See More here to see the complete list. 
Now I want to select things that I'll be okay with seeing.  So let's go and say yes to WIRED, let's do Mashable, let's do Ars Technica, The Verge, there are some Mac and specific sites like these, let's add those. You can go through the list. You can always go back here and add more and even remove others. So now that I've added a bunch you can see the ones I'm following here. Let's go ahead now and go back to Today. Then you can see it's going to say Checking for New Stories. Then it will reload the page. Now sometimes this might take a few minutes for it to do or you just have to wait till the next time you use the News App. It sometimes happens right away. But you can see here I'm only getting stories now from the sources that I chose. So now it is not showing me World News for instance. It's not showing me financial news. It's just showing me news from these sources. It's like a custom RSS reader but instead of RSS feeds it's these special Apple News feeds. 
Now if you want to further customize what you see here on the left there's always a Special Coverage section. But you can just click here to Hide that. At the bottom you'll also see Suggested. You can click here to Hide that. So you can just see these basic areas here which comes in handy to look at your history of the stories you've read, to look at stories that you've saved, for instance. You also then can go directly to a news source. So you can click here and it's just going to show you articles from that one source. 
Now what is the advantage to doing this over going to the website for that source? Well, first thing is aggregation. You're bringing together all of these news sources. You don't have to go to all these different websites. Second thing is that the News App is actually a really good reader. If you go into each article it's very nice to be able to read the articles here with minimal advertising. You can Save the story from here as well. You also can adjust your view settings so you can zoom in and zoom out for customizing for how big the text is. If you ever want to remove something from the list here on the left you can Control Click, two-finger click, or right click, and then Unfollow Channel. 
 
Now I've removed everything here from Following and let's say instead of Apple News I want to follow entertainment news just to have some light reading to take breaks throughout the day. So now I can go and do a Search for Entertainment. I can look and see channels here and I can follow various different channels, like that. Go to See More and add more to it if I want. When I'm happy with my selections here, going back to Today, it should check for News Stories and then refresh. You can see now I've got an stress-free, fun, entertainment news reader. 
Of course the number of sources that you can read really depends on whether you're a Standard news user, not paying anything, or if you're using Apple's News+ service. This is a subscription but if you're like me you're kind of getting it as the bonus when you're using the Apple One subscription which gets me lots of iCloud space, Apple TV+, and Apple Music. 
Here's a handy tip: if an article is in Apple News but you happen to be reading it on the web you can actually jump to the Apple News version of it. So here I am looking at an article and if I go to the Share Button and choose Open in News, it will open the News App and go right to that article. It's usually much nicer to read it here. But this only works if the article actually is available on Apple News. You can also go the opposite way. If you're reading an article and you're finding that something is missing from the article in the Apple News version you can go to the Share Button here and you can choose to open it in Safari, like that. It takes you to the web version of it. 
I usually find when I want to Share an article with somebody it is better to actually go to web version of it and then share that URL instead of assuming that they're going to read it in Apple News because you'll get an Apple News Link if you share it from the News App. 
Now I know some people are going to ask about RSS feeds. You can't add a raw RSS feed to Apple News. It's a shame. You should be able to do that. Instead you can only add news sources where the provider has actually registered with Apple News. It is actually fairly easy. I do it for MacMost and it is just giving them permission to use the RSS feed, basically. So if your favorite news source isn't in Apple News you may want to let them know you would like to see it there. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “Using the Mac News App Even If You Don't Like News”

Kim

9 months ago

I've never bothered with the news channel before. So, thank you for this.

sharon saccocci

I do not have the settings selection in my news.

Gary Rosenzweig

sharon: So you are saying when you select the News menu at the top, there is no Settings option there? None at all? Should be the second item, right under About News.

Bill

Very, very helpful - thanks.
Is it possible to have the article verbalized so you can listen to it? If so, what are the settings.
Gracious

Bill: Edit, Speech, Start Speaking.

Bill Sinclair

Not available in Europe!

Fiona McGrory

Not available in New Zealand either. Is this a U.S. only app? A very helpful video all the same!

Fiona: Available in more than the U.S., but not everywhere.

Robert Douglass

8 months ago

Here's a 'bonus' tip... I used to pay $$ for WSJ subscription. Now, if I see an article on the web from WSJ, of course, I'm blocked from reading it, because I don't have their 'subscription'. BUT, I do have Apple News +, which INCLUDES WSJ. So, I just do what Gary demonstrated... click on the Share button, and drop down to 'open in news'... TaDaa... there's the whole article presented in Apple News. :) Works 99.9% of the time.