I had an odd thing start happening in the Apple News widget and I'm wondering if it's just my device acting up (bad icon cache or something) or if it's intentional.
I noticed a few days ago none of the four highlighted stories in the widget showed the little byline icon (Reuters, NBC News, People, etc) like it usually does. A few hours later it was back to normal, except for one particular news source that is still not showing icons (so you can't tell what source it is unless you tap on the link to open the story).
Is anybody else seeing this behavior, or is it just me?
[doublepost=1558645712][/doublepost]I'm almost reluctant to add this information, and am not being specific about what source it is, because I really, really don't want this to turn into a political discussion--it's just a technical question of interest.
But what's interesting is that there is a particular relatively popular news source that I never tap on stories from for personal reasons. That specific source is the one that is not showing a byline icon. This could of course be a simple coincidence and it's just a technical glitch. Probably is, in fact.
But it made me wonder if Apple wasn't running an experiment to see if, when you removed the byline from stories, people who did not traditionally click on stores from that particular source would be more likely to. The answer to that would actually be pretty interesting--I know for a fact I'm at least somewhat more likely to, until I realized that all the no-byline links lead to this organization, at which point I went back to avoiding them.
The other option (again, past the more obvious simple technical glitch that means nothing) is that the organization itself blanked out its own icon (if Apple even allows that--I seriously doubt it) to see if it helped traffic.
I don't actually think either of the second two possibilities are likely, but one does wonder.
I noticed a few days ago none of the four highlighted stories in the widget showed the little byline icon (Reuters, NBC News, People, etc) like it usually does. A few hours later it was back to normal, except for one particular news source that is still not showing icons (so you can't tell what source it is unless you tap on the link to open the story).
Is anybody else seeing this behavior, or is it just me?
[doublepost=1558645712][/doublepost]I'm almost reluctant to add this information, and am not being specific about what source it is, because I really, really don't want this to turn into a political discussion--it's just a technical question of interest.
But what's interesting is that there is a particular relatively popular news source that I never tap on stories from for personal reasons. That specific source is the one that is not showing a byline icon. This could of course be a simple coincidence and it's just a technical glitch. Probably is, in fact.
But it made me wonder if Apple wasn't running an experiment to see if, when you removed the byline from stories, people who did not traditionally click on stores from that particular source would be more likely to. The answer to that would actually be pretty interesting--I know for a fact I'm at least somewhat more likely to, until I realized that all the no-byline links lead to this organization, at which point I went back to avoiding them.
The other option (again, past the more obvious simple technical glitch that means nothing) is that the organization itself blanked out its own icon (if Apple even allows that--I seriously doubt it) to see if it helped traffic.
I don't actually think either of the second two possibilities are likely, but one does wonder.