RSS guidelines for Apple News
You can publish content to News directly from your RSS or Atom feed. Follow these guidelines to prepare your content for News.
Unless otherwise indicated, this information applies to RSS and Atom feeds.
Required RSS elements
RSS feeds must be valid and conform to either the RSS 2.0 specification or the Atom Publishing Protocol and use UTF-8 encoding.
Channel elements must include title, language (with locale), and link.
Items must include title, link, and description.
Recommended feed structure
Long-form (full text) RSS is recommended. Short-form RSS, consisting of excerpts or summaries instead of full text, is also supported.
With long-form RSS, a portion of the beginning of each item’s description element—up to 200 characters—is used as the article excerpt in channel and topic views.
Secure connections
If you use secure connections (https) for your feeds, you need a valid certificate; otherwise your content won’t appear in News.
Article titles
Titles should be specific. For example, “Off-Broadway Reviews: Week of March 20” is better than “Theater Reviews.”
Titles should be between 15 and 60 characters long, but there’s no minimum. You should use enough words to make the title descriptive.
Don’t include HTML in article titles. HTML is stripped from titles.
Article excerpts
If you’re using short-form RSS, don’t include ads in description elements.
Don’t embed a link in an ellipsis (…) that ends an article description. Links at the end of descriptions (including “Read More” and “Continue”) are suppressed.
You can use basic formatting, such as bold and italic. Complex elements such as tables aren’t rendered.
If you use WordPress, make sure WordPress markup doesn’t appear in the generated RSS.
Don’t include “Read original story” or similar links. A “Read Full Story” link is automatically added at the bottom of each article in News, allowing the reader to open a web view of the article within the app.
Don’t include “Like Us,” “Tweet This,” or other social media links or buttons. Sharing options are built into the app.
Don’t include links to related articles. The article toolbar in News includes Related Stories, which shows additional articles from your channel, as well as articles from other sources.
Don’t include boilerplate article footer links to terms and conditions, user agreements, or privacy policies.
Tags and attributes
For best results, include tags in the HTML head element of each article (where relevant). See recommendations for General tags and attributes for Apple News and Open Graph tags for Apple News.
Include the <atom:link> tag with rel="self" for RSS and Atom feeds, indicating the canonical URL for the feed, especially if the feed can be referenced via multiple URLs.
Understanding feed views
The display in the feed view is collected from the corresponding entries in the RSS feed and the article’s HTML content.
Feed view display | Collected from | Feed or HTML tag | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Title | Feed Entry | For RSS: For Atom: | |||||||||
Author | Article HTML | For HTML: For Open Graph: For schema.org: | |||||||||
Description | Feed Entry | For RSS: For Atom: | |||||||||
Thumbnail | Article HTML | For Open Graph: For schema.org: | |||||||||
Publish date | Feed Entry | For RSS: For Atom: | |||||||||
The feed view also collects the link (from RSS or Atom) and language (from HTML), but these items aren’t displayed in the feed view.
Feed view display | Collected from | Feed or HTML tag | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Link | Feed Entry | For RSS: For Atom: | |||||||||
Language | Article HTML | For Open Graph: | |||||||||
See the Open Graph protocol.
Note: When the Apple News API is used to create articles, this information is gathered using accessoryText in the Apple News API.