Apple News Is Getting Its Very First Editor-in-Chief

Apple has reportedly hired the very first editor-in-chief for its own mobile aggregation app, Apple News, the company revealed on Thursday. Lauren Kern, currently a high-ranking editor at New York Magazine, will be joining Apple on June 2 — and will be the first person to fill the new position at Cupertino. According to Politico, who first broke the story in its Morning Media newsletter, it’s not entirely clear what the editor-in-chief role will entail. Similarly, Kern’s LinkedIn profile has yet to be updated, but her hiring suggests that the tech giant has bigger ambitions for Apple News.

Kern’s departure from New York Magazine was confirmed in a staff memo by editor-in-chief Adam Moss, which was obtained by CNN. “I am not happy to report that we are losing our beloved Lauren Kern to the Apple corporation,” Moss wrote. “I mean, I’m happy for Lauren certainly. It’s an exciting opportunity to be the editor in chief of Apple News, to bring a journalistic vigor and intelligence to an operation that has always seemed to me so full of promise.” Kern has been serving as the executive editor for New York Magazine since 2014, before that, she was a deputy editor at the New York Times Magazine.

Apple has, so far, declined to comment on the matter, so we can only speculate as to what Kern will actually do at Apple. News is currently an aggregation platform, pulling content from various publications and content partners such as the New York Times and BuzzFeed. Currently, it doesn’t produce any journalism itself (although that could change), but it does have an editorial staff that curates content and decides which stories to promote and feature. The addition of an editor-in-chief position at Apple News team could be a sign that Apple is taking its role as a gatekeeper seriously, and is filling out its editorial team with media professionals to help it further its goals in that area.

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