There are few if any media outlets that can really go up against the big social networks and have a prayer of stealing away attention. The New York Times might be an exception.
When I first heard about NYT Now I didn’t think twice. It seemed like yet another addition to an already complicated, expensive offering. And its name suggested the reason I didn’t need it: speed is not the primary thing I’m looking for in consuming the Times’ content.
But a piece at Nieman Lab has me rethinking my skepticism:
NYT Now can be seen in part as an Empire Strikes Back play: It aims to take readership back from Twitter and Facebook.
In most cases, for most publications, this will be a losing battle. Still, I can’t help but feel that the moment is ripe for some modest progress here, and The New York Times might be the ones to do it.
I’m not the only one backing away from the social platforms, turned off by the chattering torrent therein. It seems harder every day to maintain a decent signal to noise ratio, which in theory is something the platforms themselves could change. They are developing better filters, and will continue to do so. But with their entire business strategies hinging on more eyeballs on more content for longer, they have a hard time actually making progress on this problem. Essentially, I want tools that make it easier for me to spend less time on Twitter and still find all that I want. That’s in conflict with Twitter’s business plan.
Of course, The Times wants eyeballs on its content for as long as possible, too. But the fact that its business model now includes a subscription component helps here. Once I’m paying for the content, the economics of providing a product I’m not obsessively checking constantly work better. So I’m hopeful that The Times might successfully offer a news feed app that works without being a hopelessly addictive time suck.
A big piece here is that NYT Now plans to include some stories from elsewhere, overcoming one of the biggest barrier to news apps in general, which is that no single publication can ever have all the content you want to read.
There’s also the price. My hesitation in paying for The Times is well documented, and can be summarized as:
1) As much as I like the Times, I don’t need it. And I’d rather be asked to support good journalism than forced to pay for it.
2) If I am going to pay money to support good journalism, I want to know that my money is going directly to that cause.
I wish The Times were structured more like The Guardian, with an endowment funding its efforts. But that’s not the case, and I’m more amenable to paying for it than I was a couple years ago, for various reasons. But at nearly $9/week, the price for the full digital subscription is still high for me.
My basic benchmark in terms of what feels reasonable is Netflix and Spotify: the $7-10/month range. Sure enough, NYT Now falls squarely in that range, at $2/week. That’s getting cheap enough that I might pay merely to support the paper’s mission.
The final reason I’m excited is that I’ve found Circa’s Android app more satisfying than I would have thought, in large part because it is sparing with its notifications. (It seems to only push out truly major news, as opposed to The Times, which pushes alerts about the Final Four.) The presentation in Circa is so clean and condensed that it for the first time has me inclined to see real value in the news app, above and beyond the content, where previously it has always seemed that an RSS reader or Twitter handles the app layer just fine.
For all these reasons, I could see NYT Now working for me (once it comes out for Android). It’s a relatively inexpensive way to support good journalism, and a less noisy way to stay on top of the news as opposed to social media. And they’ve finally learned the lesson that aggregation doesn’t dilute the brand. I may finally have found a news app I want to pay for.
beyond the times 