A packed set of Apple announcements could have big impacts on news publishers — for good and for ill » Nieman Journalism Lab

Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference felt unusually overstuffed. Without a marquee new laptop to announce or a big new chip strategy to discuss, it seems that Apple just packed a ton of updates into the operating systems that are always the stars of WWDC, iOS and macOS. They’re important to journalists because — especially in the U.S. and much of Europe — news organizations’ best customers disproportionately use iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

This year, Apple announced two big changes that could well make life more difficult for publishers, along with quite a few welcome features, reasonable tweaks, and interesting side experiments. All in all, while the news business was nowhere near center stage Monday, I think this will end up being one of the more impactful Apple events in a while for publishers.

Apple spent a lot of time pushing a new set of features around focus — about better separating the important stuff you want to focus on from the junk you don’t want to. The biggest, er, focus of that work is in push notifications.

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