…but I still want to get updates about REAL news events, such as major supreme court rulings or other major news events.
I’m referring to the News app.
Is there any way to customize this or does this firehose only have an off/on switch?
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Make sure to use the like and dislike buttons, as this will help train it. I personally follow business news sites more than general news sites which helps to tailor things too.
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Yes, use those like and dislike buttons both on the stories you don’t want as well as on news sources you don’t want/like.
It works pretty well but I’ll say it isn’t perfect. To me celebrity deaths aren’t top national news but I’m clearly not the norm.
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Depends on the celebrity. Mostly it’s just noise, as you say.
But I surprised myself a couple of weeks ago by being seriously shook up when I rolled out of bed, looked at my iPhone and saw a notification that Anthony Bourdain had died. I didn’t even know I cared that much about Bourdain. I didn’t know I cared about him at all. But his death had me down me for days.
Which caused me to vastly reduce my news notifications. Because who needs that kind of bad news first thing in the morning? Makes no difference if I find out about it later in the day – not like I have to rush to get condolences to the family or anything like that. He’s a celebrity; he’s a stranger to me.
I love the news app, but my habits tend to get me in trouble. I consciously stopped following topics like “BuzzFeed” and their awful click-bait headlines. I do think there’s some powerful recognition going on for each story you open regardless of whether you “like” or “dislike” it. Best not to see them at all in my case.
I’d suggest actively turning off suggested channels that you aren’t interested in on top of liking and disliking as the others suggested. I’d love to see some customization about the news stories that drop as notifications, but since they weren’t that useful I turned them off altogether. Even the 5 highlights on Apple Watch are often repeated political news and less “breaking” that you might want to hear about like a major disaster.
Talking of Apple News app, is there a way to automatically load the stories in the morning so I can read them offline or when network coverage is poor? The news tend to take ages to load when tethering on my iPad.
Okay, I confess that I never noticed this feature before! Thank you for pointing it out. I will start using and hope that it helps.
You can also block channels. I have done that in order to avoid the very issue you are raising. I couldn’t care less about celebrities.
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