There is no denying that the digital age has caused quite a change for journalism. With the internet available right from our smartphones and tablets, physical newspapers continue to become more obsolete.
It's easier now than ever to just download the app from your favorite paper or news organization, and read all the latest stories without having to jumble through the paper on a crowded commute. Why pay for a paper when you can just read a news story online for free?
But some of these apps come at cost. If you read The New York Times daily, you know that its NYT Now iOS app only allowed users to read 10 free articles per month, or pay a monthly subscription fee of $7.99 or between $15 and $35 per month for full digital subscriptions.
"We have seen very high engagement and retention among our NYT Now users, [but] we have not seen the number of subscriptions we were hoping for," said a rep from The New York Times to The Verge.
So the news organization decided to free itself from the subscription model, now making it free to read The New York Times as part of a redesign of the NYT Now app.
The paper has only about 200,000 NYT Now users, with most of them having full subscriptions to The Times. So it only makes sense to offer content on the app for free. And as the saying goes, "If it's free, it's for me!"
After ditching its subscription model, the NY Times Now app will now work off of an ad-based model to generate revenue. Those who signed up for the app using iTunes will no longer be billed, and those who subscribed on NYTimes.com will have extended access to content including all stories on the site and app.
The redesign comes in hopes the Times will gain more readers who normally wouldn't pick up the paper from a newsstand. The app still presents stories in a timeline, with editors selecting the "most important stories around the clock," along with their commentary. These selected articles are displayed with a photo, headline and bullet points of key facts. Tap on the story to read it in its entirety.
Users also can read articles from other news sites across the web.
However, with the redesign and subscription model change, less stories will be offered on the app, decreasing content from 25 articles to only 10 at a time. New features include the ability to see amount of new stories that have been added since the last time the user browsed, and an option to receive alerts to the Morning Briefing. There is also an overall darker theme on the app.
NYT Now is only available for iOS, and can be downloaded now for free.
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Photo: samchills | Flickr
