This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, June 11.

Apple is a company full of surprises, and announcements that sometimes amaze us (like when new products are introduced that become essential parts of our daily lives within a short period of time), and that often make sense, as in this news from the latest Apple press conference.

The big news is that Apple is launching an app called News.

Yes, the name is plain and old fashioned. The concept, well, not so new.

What we will have with Apple News is another highly curated app with what the company describes as “beautiful content from the world’s greatest sources, personalized for you.” Some compare it to Flipboard, and I think the concept is quite similar to The Washington Post’s relatively new The Post Most.

Apple News will get out of the gate with such titles as Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, CNN, The Atlantic, ESPN, BuzzFeed, Quartz, NPR, and Daring Fireball. Publishers may find Apple News of interest, as they will have their products instantly available on a large number of iPhones, iPads, etc.

Then there is the monetization incentive, as per an article in Nieman Lab:

There’s also monetization built in, via Apple’s ad platform iAd: “Earn 100% of the revenue from ads you sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for you. iAd provides campaign management, targeting and reporting capabilities that help drive your business.” This will likely serve as a nice upsell for premium publishers, though I suspect all but the biggest publishers will rely on Apple to do the selling. (And Apple is no Facebook when it comes to ad sales; your CPMs are unlikely to inspire.)