There must be more to the news than the death of an owl

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A Eurasian owl died in New York City last week. Flaco the Owl, who a year ago escaped into the wild after his enclosure was vandalised, died after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side.

Though I am not a New Yorker, or an animal person, the story has proved rather harder to escape than Central Park Zoo. I am surely a little bit to blame: I am planning a trip to New York for Passover and the internet’s various recommendation engines have mistaken my interest in what art exhibitions are worth trying to see with a concern for the city’s wildlife. I then made the mistake of making a grumpy joke about wall-to-wall owl coverage on social media, putting further bars on my algorithmic prison.

One reason why the melancholy death of Flaco is hard to escape is that the story has been extensively covered: not only by the New York Times, but also NPR, the Associated Press, the Independent, Mail Online, the Guardian and a host of other publications. Rather more people, I would bet, could name Flaco than a single member of New York City Council.

When I grumbled about the prominence of the owl’s demise to a friend, they assumed that I too had discovered it on Apple News. (My friend, to be clear, is a 100 per cent satisfied customer when it comes to tedious avian news.) It is, however, absent from the only real rival to Apple News in the UK: the BBC’s news app.

That’s fitting, because the apps are pioneering two different approaches to news in the 21st century. On the one hand, you have the BBC’s edited, one-size-fits-all-approach, on the other Apple News’ personalised service.

“Everyone’s BBC homepage looks the same” versus “no two Apple News-es are alike” is just one ongoing debate over the future of news. Many of the louder and more contentious disputes revolve around who pays for it (the Indonesian government is the latest to insist…