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New York Times reveals labyrinthine subscription plans, Canadian readers already hitting paywall
We knew it was coming, and now The New York Times has followed through on its promise to erect a paywall for online content, which means no more free news -- kind of. Starting today in Canada and March 28th in the US, NYTimes.com will ask visitors reading more than 20 articles per month to pay for their info fix. The new plan offers monthly subscriptions of $15 with a smartphone app, $20 with tablet app, or $35 for complete digital access -- subscribers with a physical subscription will be granted a full pass, except on e-readers. Further convoluting the pay structure, entry from sites like Twitter and Facebook won't face the same restrictions, and access via Google is set at five free visits per day. Other news sources, including The Wall Street Journal, have already started charging for online content in the face of declining ad revenue, but this is certainly one of the most elaborate systems we've seen so far. The subscription plan was unleashed in Canada today, allowing the paper to iron out any kinks before hitting the US, which means you've got just under two weeks to hit NYTimes.com completely free -- after that, prepare to be confused.
New York Times website, iPhone and iPad subscriptions start soon
We knew it was coming, and now there is a date: the Gray Lady is charging admission this month. The New York Times digital products (the website, TimesReader app, phone apps and iPad edition) will be subject to a subscription fee for US customers starting March 28, with Canadian customers active now as a test population. Details were spelled out in a letter to readers and in a Times news story. As of 3/28, if you want to access the digital editions of The New York Times here are your options: At the New York Times website, NYTimes.com, you can view up to 20 articles a month at no charge. After that, you'll get a notice inviting you to subscribe. Links inbound from social media services like Facebook and Twitter will work independently of the 20-article limit, as will links from some search engines; Google inbound links will be capped at 5 articles per day, per reader. On smartphones like the iPhone and on tablets (iPad) the Top News section will remain free. To see any other sections, you must subscribe. There is no subscription plan available for just the NYTimes website. The lowest cost option is access to NYTimes.com plus a smartphone app for $15.00 per four-week period. A subscription to the NYTimes.com site and a tablet subscription is $20.00 for four weeks. Access to the website, smartphone and tablet editions is $35.00 for the same period. You can get a full breakdown on pricing here.
NYT: Apple considering a cheaper iPhone, but not a smaller one right now
Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal seemed pretty sure that an iPhone nano was inbound, but the New York Times' anonymous sources dispute that tale -- the paper writes that "Apple is not currently developing a smaller iPhone," and that the company is "not planning to introduce a smaller iPhone anytime soon." While the publication doesn't outright deny the existence of such a device at any point in the story, it does quote an anonymous Apple executive as saying that it doesn't make sense for the company to create multiple iPhone form factors at any given time, and an anonymous Apple engineer as saying that cheaper components, not a smaller size, would make for a cheaper overall price. One thing's for sure: either Apple's making one, or it's not. In related news, the Times' sources corroborate the idea that Apple will make MobileMe free, and say that the next full-sized iPhone is nearly complete. Woo!
New York Times updates iPad app to stop constant crashing
It's about time. Ever since the NYTimes for iPad app replaced the lame Editors' Choice app, it has been tough sledding trying to read the news. It often took a long time to load, and then before displaying a single story, it crashed. I reinstalled the app, and that made things better for a while until the crashes returned. I wasn't the only one having trouble. The app store reviews of the previous version were brutal. The app was updated over the holidays, and I'm happy to report it is far more stable. I can actually read the news without having to constantly relaunch the app. The only downside I experienced was I had to log in again. If I had been commuting or on a trip and didn't have that info it would have been a pain. The New York Times app is free, but in early 2011 it will require a subscription. The old version wasn't worth $0.02, so I'm glad to see the app back on track. If you dumped the app in disgust, it's worth another look now, even though it is not perfect. In particular, the navigation bar at the bottom covers up some text unless you dismiss it. If you don't register for a free account, the app will constantly nag you. Ironically, the iPhone app from the Times works great. The developers writing the iPad app should take the iPhone team to lunch and get a bit of advice.
Retaining your masculinity while carrying the iPad
The New York Times had an odd post recently in which it responded to men who were having trouble carrying their iPad around town in a masculine fashion. According to the article in its Fashion & Style section, some men have even eschewed taking their iPad in public just because there's a lack of suitably macho bags. Scott Stein at CNET even rated iPad bags in terms of their "humiliation index." I've used a laptop for many, many years and I'll admit this isn't a problem that's ever occurred to me. Any doubts or questions about my bag are instantly dissipated when I bust out awesome technology like the iPad. I guess I could see a bit of embarrassment if you're wearing a funky fanny pack or something, but there are tons of great looking bags for the iPad. Just check out the Booq Boa push bag, for example If you really have trouble with establishing your masculinity via your gadget bag, let me suggest using a Sharpie to draw some skulls on it or maybe add some spikes.
Google demos Chrome Web Store, rolling out later today to US (update: now live)
It hasn't been that long since we first saw Google's web store -- mid-May, to be exact. An updated version is currently being showcased on stage at the Chrome event. The UI looks much more refined, and those who are itching to try some out yourself, it seems some of the web apps are already available, at least partially: NPR, The New York Times, Amazon Windowshop. If you ask us, they feel a lot like iPad apps for browsers and mice / keyboard. Audio can run in the background even if you move to another tab. There's offline mode, too. App purchases are tied to your Google account, naturally. There's some gaming, but from what we've seen so far ("you pop it!"), it's nothing you're gonna be focusing a lot of time on. Interesting note from the Q&A is that the apps, since they're built with "standard web technologies," will work with all compatible browsers. We've been trying to access the web store (via the Chrome browser, naturally), but it's currently hiding behind a "coming soon" redirect -- it's rolling out later today, though, at least for the US, so keep an eye out. Update: Try that link one more time, the Chrome Web Store should now be live. %Gallery-109484%
WikiLeaks: Chinese Politburo responsible for Google hacking
You had to know something interesting would come out of the quarter million diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks just, well, leaked late on Sunday, and the New York Times has picked out a doozie for us. As it turns out, that big brouhaha in China surrounding the hacking of Gmail accounts was actually a state-authorized attack. Such was the report from a Chinese informant working for the US embassy, and the disclosure goes on to say that it was part of a "coordinated campaign of computer sabotage," reaching a wide net of targets, including American government machines, American private businesses, and... the Dalai Lama. Hey, China's hardly the first country to ever engage in state-sponsored cyber espionage (ahem, Stuxnet), but we can't say we're not disappointed. Let's keep it classy from here on out, alright guys?
Updated: Pulse News Reader for iOS now free
If you were intrigued by our former coverage of Pulse, a slick reimagining of how RSS feeds can work on the iPad and iPhone, but were put off by the modest asking price, here's a good way to start your week. As the New York Times reports, Alphonso Labs has secured $800k in venture capital funding and is moving to a different business model. It is now trying to "attract more users, and with them, paid partnerships with publishers and advertisers." This sounds like we'll end up with in-app ads in the long run, but for the moment, none are present. It's also likely that it'll be doing more deals with content producers to spotlight their feeds in the "featured" section of the app, which is a less intrusive way for them to generate revenue. If you've never used Pulse, it's more like Flipboard than traditional RSS readers, like Reeder. It arranges feed content into attractive, image-heavy scrolling areas that try to create the feel of a glossy personalized magazine. This is both a strength and a weakness -- it works better with some types of feeds than others -- but overall it provides a pleasant way to catch up with the news over your breakfast. Update: following numerous commenters expressing concerns that, having paid for a previous version of Pulse, they would now be subjected to ads, we contacted Alphonso Labs for a statement. Click through to see what it said.
New York Times to launch bestseller list for e-books in early 2011
The New York Times has dropped some PR on us this morning, making an official announcement that it will begin to publish a bestseller list for e-books in early 2011. The current NYT bestseller lists -- which are divided into several categories -- are considered by many to be the definitive metric for a book's success. The Times will have two separate lists covering fiction and non-fiction when it launches, drawing on information from various retailers, and will be independently verified by third party company RoyaltyShare. The list will appear in both the print and online editions of the paper. The full press release is below
New York Times iPad app gets bug fix but still somewhat flaky
The New York Times for iPad app has received a much-needed update. The first version, introduced in the middle of October, replaced the older free Editor's Choice app, which only had a small subset of Times content. This new version is free but only temporarily, as the newspaper intends to start charging sometime in 2011. I've been using the full content version since it came out. It crashed frequently, enough to make the app unappealing, and ultimately unusable. Today's update is not plagued with the aggravating crashes of version 1, but it is still far from perfect. It's great to have the full content of the paper, along with slide shows and videos, but there is absolutely no search function. That, I think, is a pretty important feature when you are dishing out all this content. As before, the app is slow to start. In my tests, it takes from 6-10 seconds before it displays anything at all. I realize it is pre-loading a lot of content, but I think the programmers need to work on getting the app to respond faster. There are some other strange issues. While reading page 3 of a section the app jumped back to page 1 while I wasn't even touching the screen. Huh? While reading this morning's election news, I was struck that the same images and slide shows appeared on many pages; I even saw the same image twice on one page. No self-respecting editor would put a newspaper together that way, and there are surely some clever options the developers can use to stop this visual overkill. I like the Times, and I wish them well with this app, but it must improve before they start charging people. Check the gallery to see the superfluous graphics. %Gallery-106610%
Twitter adding 370,000 new users a day, only half of them weight loss spammers
If you weren't out egging cars all weekend, you may have noticed The New York Times profile of former Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Among other things, the article contains some interesting nuggets of information about the service's user base and rate of growth... and let's just say that it's growing. Fast. According to the Times, Twitter is adding nearly 370,000 users per day to its current (as of the writing) user base of 175 million. Yes, that's heading ever closer to the 200 million mark, a truly huge number. No further information was spilled about where those users are coming from and what their level of engagement is (it's been reported that as much as 55% of users never make a single Tweet and that many of them don't follow anybody at all). However, we're pretty sure of one thing: newcomers to Twitter won't have any trouble fitting in if they just stick to talking about food and drink (or dieting, if you want to fit in with the bots). Hit up the source for the full, riveting portrait.
NYTimes for iPad app delivers entire newspaper for free... until 2011
Remember that New York Times Editor's Choice app that hit right alongside the iPad's launch? Hello, overhaul. NYTimes for iPad was just unleashed today, with many describing the results as an ideal newspaper-to-tablet port. The primary difference? This is the entire New York Times, delivered to your iPad free of charge (assuming you're a registered member of the site, which can also be accomplished for no charge). The new app brings over 25 sections of content to readers, but the glorious fun is sure to be short lived; The Times is planning to launch a pay model next year, and after that wall goes up, the app will also require a paid subscription. Enjoy it while it lasts, we guess.
New York Times replaces Editor's Choice app with full content
The New York Times has replaced its limited "Editor's Choice" iPad app with a new version that provides the newspaper's full content, pending the user's (free) registration. The app will be free for users until "early 2011." Unlike Editor's Choice, the new version (simply called NYTimes for iPad) includes articles from every section of the publication. You can navigate each via a pop-up list. Select any one to read the related articles. You'll notice that a banner pops up prompting you to register. The process is as simple as entering a username and a password, and will push you out of the app and into Safari to finish the process. Once complete, you must click a ink in a confirmation email. The next time you launch the app, the banners will be gone. I spent a short amount of time testing it this morning, and found it to hang up quite a bit when selecting an article to read from the grid. Other than that, it was what I expected. The UI will be familiar to anyone who used the Editor's Choice app. Whiel access to the full content will be free for 2010, that will change next year when the paper's new paywall will go up. Those who pay or subscribe to the paper will enjoy full access, while others will have limited access. The website paywall is intended to allow infrequent visitors free reading access to the Times' content. It was reported that Steve Jobs himself disliked the initial NYT iPad app because the content was limited. Now that that problem has been eliminated, and rumors of App Store subscriptions circulate, we'll see what's to come of the Times on the iPad.
News publishers looking to the Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry PlayBook for refuge as well
In case you were worried that it was just Apple love that got major news outlets on the iPad so quickly, you should know that the general sense of desperation (or is it their never ending sense of adventure?) pervading the likes of the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today has them building apps for the Galaxy Tab as well. The news comes courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, and has yet to be announced officially by the parties involved -- though we have a hard time doubting any of it. It makes sense, of course: the big cost is producing content for a tablet form factor, not building the reader app, and the Galaxy Tab naturally won't be the last of its Android kind. The WSJ and The Financial Times are also apparently some possible gets for RIM's PlayBook, though less is known about those deals. On the Tab, The New York Times is supposed to be pre-loaded with some carrier's versions of the device, and its app will be free until January of next year when The Times starts charging for its website.
In Brief: Jobs' journey through the wilderness made Apple Inc. possible
There's an interesting Randall Stross piece in Saturday's New York Times about the alternative timeline where Steve Jobs never resigned from Apple. Given his legendary fussiness over every detail and his frustrating inability to get the NeXT hardware platform past the "expensive curiosity" stage, Stross surmises that Jobs learned painful lessons about delegation and collaboration during his years at NeXT. When he returned to Apple (along with the NeXTStep operating system that formed the core of Mac OS X), he was far more ready to handle the challenge. Do you think Steve would have failed to transform Apple if he had never left? We welcome your musings below.
A beautiful timeline of educational gadgets reminds us that the Scantron machine was really awesome
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a timeline of photographs of technological advances in the classroom. While the blackboard and the horn-book (a wooden paddle printed with the alphabet) look like artifacts that might be leftover from when dinosaurs walked the earth, the ones that are a bit newer are quite interesting to behold. For instance, you may or may not be old enough to remember the blue-inked glory of a mimeograph machine (the oldest example dating from around 1940 is above), or the awesomeness of a Scantron machine which automatically graded multiple choice tests. Seriously, we can't tell you how many hundreds of Scantron forms we filled out in our time as students, but it was unfortunately more than none. Hit up the source link to see all of the glorious gadgets throughout the years, but be forewarned: the last one is an iPad.
Starbucks reveals plans for a Digital Network, made up of 'exclusive and premium' digital content
Free WiFi not enough of an enticement to get you to step into a Starbucks? Don't worry, the ubiquitous frappuccino purveyor has another card up its mocha-stained sleeve. Beginning this fall, Starbucks locations will be enriched with a new Digital Network, a freely accessible portal unto exclusive content from some of the more highbrow providers. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today will flesh out the news offering, Yahoo will pick up business and career duties, and Apple's iTunes will provide free downloads to sate entertainment needs. Curiously enough, nobody is exchanging any cash up front -- Starbucks isn't paying for this and neither are you -- but the trick is as always to try and upsell you on to even more premium goodies, in which case the coffee chain and content provider have a revenue-sharing deal in place to split the profit. Doesn't sound like the worst idea in the world to us, bring on the freebies!
Get the New York Times on iPad via BN... sort of
Update: Barnes & Noble's PR team pinged us to point out two salient points. #1, the message above does in fact note that only the iPod touch and iPhone versions of the newspaper/magazine subscriptions are temporarily offline -- the iPad subs are still available, as I found. #2, via the "Go To" button at the top of the eReader app screen, you can access an abbreviated table of contents (a list of the paper's sections); that's a help, but still not a particularly well-adapted navigational approach for all the stories in the NYT. My apologies for the errors. We got the heads-up from reader Jehuda S. that Barnes & Noble is now listing the New York Times as available for subscription or single-copy download into the company's B&N eReader app. A quick check of B&N's site does indeed show the paper available for $0.99 a day, or $19.99 for a monthly subscription -- the monthly price is the same as Amazon's Kindle version, but that edition isn't available for iPhone or iPad yet. Amazon's deal with the NYT is a possible explanation for the kneecapped Editor's Choice app, which doesn't offer the paper's full content. Great, so the paper's ready for prime time on the iPad courtesy of Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble? Well, not so much. First of all, even though I was able to go through with the $0.99 purchase of today's paper [for my iPad], the site is featuring a banner update as seen above -- newspaper delivery is being 'temporarily suspended' to the iDevices iPhone and iPod touch, with a 'better reading experience' around the corner. That's good, because the current reading experience is downright cringeworthy. There's no navigation to speak of except for section front pages and 'next story' / 'previous story' -- in order to see the whole paper, you have to scroll via the page scroller at the bottom (today's edition shows as 525 screensful, not easy to manage). There's no master table of contents, no overall list of sections, no moxie whatsoever. It's a bit like someone faxing you the New York Times, story by story -- not at all a positive way to consume this premium content. I can't recommend you get the Times in this fashion until B&N revamps the reader; good news is, it looks like there's consensus on that point over at B&N. Thanks Jehuda!
Droid X ad pokes fun at iPhone 4 antenna troubles
The world of corporate cheap shots has today been enriched in its number with one supersized ad for one supersized phone. BGR reports that Motorola took out a full-page spread in the New York Times on this final day of June, which was ostensibly dedicated to promoting the positives of its mighty Droid X. But Moto has also followed in the footsteps of Nokia in making a not so subtle jab at the latest king of the smartphone realm. According to the ad, one of the most important things about the Droid X is that: "It comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls." Glad we got that established -- next Moto will be telling us the alarm clock on its phones works just fine too. Skip past the break for the untrimmed ad.
New York Times for iPad update adds content
The iPad app that Steve Jobs supposedly dislikes, New York Times Editor's Choice, was updated today. The update partially addresses Steve's primary concern: the app omits a lot of the paper's daily content. Specifically, the new build adds an Arts section and some videos. The Arts section has two "pages" worth of articles, so it's on par with the others. There are also five videos. Navigation is clear and easy and they look great on the iPad's screen. But it's still a small amount of content. We assume they've got a subscription model in the works and we're eager to see what it is. Other changes include re-sizable text and an option to share stories on Facebook, Twitter and email. Photos now indicate if they contain a slideshow with a "more photos" icon, and all photos can be resized with a pinch. It's a decent enough update that adds some content. Not a lot, but some. Hopefully Steve Jobs will be mollified.
