Mean Green Nation is now on Apple News! So read the email from Apple announcing that Mean Green Nation is, in fact, available on Apple’s struggling news reader app. Except it isn’t available. There is a channel, and there is a place for the stories 1 but nothing is showing up.

I asked my wife to check it out for me, thinking that perhaps since I was looking at my content with my Apple ID I was causing some sort of problem. Maybe the public could see stuff. That’s what matters, anyway.

She couldn’t see anything.

Welp. Now it is time for troubleshooting. Maybe I was doing something wrong? I signed up for News Publisher choosing the RSS option. It seemed easier and quicker than learning Apple News Format or setting up a plugin on MGN to publish to News. It seemed straight forward. I googled. I looked through the documentation. I became frustrated.

Apple News is iOS only. News Publisher is only accessible via desktop web browser. Jonathan Poritsky laid out the weirdness inherent in publishing via Apple News in a News post I cannot link to because it is News-only and therefore not on the regular web.

A good sentence he wrote:

If I ould publish here from my iPhone I think I would ‘get’ the point of this. Right now . . . no clue.

I have no desire to spend time creating a News-only content stream. MGN seemed like the best of my collection of websites/blogs/blatherings to test the format and there could be some usefulness for MGN’s readers. Could be. Maybe.

As it is now, I cannot even change to the other option — publishing straight ANF items. I imagine there is some kind of delay here preventing all the normal options from being visible on my News Publisher dashboard, and so I will hold off on creating tickets or getting very I was told by apple care out here. But I can blog about it.

  1. Apple’s terminology. ↩