Media monitoring is broken for small comms teams. Here's my fix.
Inkline 1.2, the 'Editorial' update is the biggest yet. More than 800 hand-verified publications across 50 countries, sorted by market and by beat, so you can build a working newsroom in five minutes.
Inkline is a news reading app for iPhone and iPad, built for people who read the news for a living. I built it as a passion project, and it’s now taking off… 1.2 ‘Editorial’ rebuilds Inkline’s news engine, polishes the design, and refines features that you’ll find unmissable once experienced.
Here is everything that changed.
The publication database
More than 800 quality publications across over 50 countries, every single feed checked by hand before it went in. The upgraded Inkline editorial engine has the following superpowers:
It knows where a publication sits. Every title carries its home market, so the database can be sorted by geography. A UK financial services brief and a German industrials brief are two different sets of titles, and 1.2 knows the difference.
It knows what a publication covers. Sources are grouped by subject in language you already use. Such as News, Business and Finance, Technology and Science, Politics, Healthcare, Media and Marketing, Culture and Sport, Energy.
It opens where you are. The directory defaults to the language of the device it is installed on, so a reader in London lands on English titles and a reader in Berlin lands on German ones. Everything else is one tap away.
The trades are in there. PRWeek, PR Daily, Campaign, Press Gazette, PROVOKE, Ragan, O’Dwyer’s and more. This is the part general-purpose readers have never bothered with, because their audience is not us. White Wiki may have found itself as an option in there too.
Nothing is missing. For the geeks amongst us, you’ll know the underlying RSS technology is sometimes not available. Well, now those publications are still in the database as Headlines sources, fetched on your own device.
Add or remove anything in a tap, with an Undo if you change your mind. Your saved articles and notes are kept either way.
Neutral signals only. Each title shows where it is based and its access model, either Paywall or Some free articles. Inkline offers no opinion on which outlets are better.
This engine completely upgrades your experience of Inkline, allowing you to cut through the noise.
One search for everything
The Search tab used to be three boxes. It is now one. Type once and you get publications to follow, stories already sitting in your news, and topics to monitor across the whole web. Your existing monitors sit at the top, and category management now lives in the same place. Simple.
Voices, rebuilt
Voices was a follow list. In 1.2 it becomes a directory of the newsroom.
Search any journalist or any outlet.
Browse the writers behind your own feeds, grouped by publication, so you can see who is worth following at the mastheads you already read.
Following someone now finds their work reliably, because outlet names resolve to a verified domain behind the scenes instead of a guess.
Cleaner cards, with the outlet set as a quiet kicker above the writer’s name.
Compare the coverage
When several of your outlets run the same story, Inkline now shows an “Also covered by” line. Tap it, either in the river or at the end of a piece, and you can read every outlet’s version side by side.
Cross-source de-duplication has been in Inkline since 1.0 as a tidying function. This turns it into a comparison tool. Stacking eight versions of the same story shows you the line that travelled, the desk that went early, and the desk that took the release as read.
The Editorial look
The whole app has been redrawn around Inkline’s ink drop and ripple mark.
A new signature colour. The deep navy of the logo replaces the old warm red, so the one splash of colour in the app is the brand’s own.
A masthead on the home screen. The Inkline wordmark opens Today the way a nameplate opens a newspaper.
Literata is the new reading font, a screen-tuned literary serif built for long pieces. Newsreader stays as the wordmark and remains selectable if you preferred it.
A tidier front page. Today’s category sections have colour in the headers and calm rows beneath.
A better front page
Front Page is now the default for every category. It leads with the stories that most of your own outlets are running, rather than handing you the firehose in date order. Previously this was only available on iPad, but its now on iPhone… plus upgrades across both devices.
A dateline opens it, with your region and today’s date, newspaper style. That comes from your device settings and never from your location.
Filler gets demoted. Crypto price posts and affiliate coupon roundups are pushed below real news.
Monitoring you can rely on
Inkline’s web-wide topic monitors are more dependable in 1.2.
Alerts come first. Background refresh now checks your alert-enabled monitors before anything else, so a genuinely new story reaches you faster.
Time Sensitive alerts break through Focus modes for the coverage you asked to be told about.
Honesty when it matters. If iOS background refresh is switched off on your device, Inkline tells you. An alerting tool that fails silently is worse than none at all.
A freshness line. A quiet “updated X minutes ago, keeps up to date” shows the state of the feed at a glance.
Under the hood
A serious performance and stability pass, most of it driven by testing on real devices. This includes smoother scrolling, faster responsiveness, and just a better experience. Plus, stories no longer disappear the moment you have read them.
Still private
Nothing changed here. Everything stays on your device. No account, no ads, and you’re not tracked. The App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected”. The AI Brief that summarises your morning is generated on the device with Apple Intelligence, on hardware that supports it, and nothing is sent anywhere. Inkline can read offline.
Getting it
1.2 is a free update if you already have Inkline. If you do not, it runs on iPhone and iPad on a yearly subscription and is free to use for its first 7 days.
If something is broken, tell me. If you have a feature idea, drop me a message.