Tim Peterson, Digiday:

Apple has become so serious about competing with Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter as a distribution outlet for news publishers that it’s paying publishers to unveil shows on Apple News first.

Last month, BuzzFeed News premiered “Future History: 1968,” a documentary series that recaps major events that happened that year, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race between the U.S. and Russia to land a person on the moon. BuzzFeed News released the first three episodes exclusively on Apple News, a week before uploading them to Facebook Watch, YouTube, Twitter and its own mobile app.

The Apple News launch was part of a deal in which Apple paid BuzzFeed for the first-window rights to the show’s first three episodes and cut BuzzFeed a share of the revenue from pre-roll ads that Apple sold against the episodes, said Roxanne Emadi, head of audience development at BuzzFeed.

This is a notable development in the news platform wars. Apple paying for news content jibes nicely with their steady investment in entertainment content. Not clear what form “News 2.0” will ultimately settle into. Same for Apple’s entertainment platform. This is all still forming and unfolding, both for Apple and for the rest of the players.

In a related story, this Fast Company piece, titled Say Goodbye To The Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now talks about the critical importance of reputation in combating fake news. And reputation is one of Apple’s strengths.