iTunes For News? How About A Better iPhone App

January 13th, 2009

David Carr of the New York Times suggests making an “iTunes for News”. It’s an obvious assumption, and he pins some hope on a mythical, large-format iPod touch device, and says “now all we need is a business model to go along with it.”

Well, the New York Times can get started on this right away, and the business model is starting at least me, in the face on a daily basis. I have an iPhone and the New York Times has a free iPhone App called NYTimes. It’s adequate, but definitely not kick-ass. I’d pay for a kick-ass NYTimes app, and surely, others would too - and there’s a business model.

Here’s how the NYTimes iPhone app suffers in comparison with its competitors (Bloomberg, USAToday, Mobile News [pulls content from AP], USAToday):

  • NYTimes is slower. Pretty much every time I fire it up, it slows to a crawl when loading content, and I get a perpetually spinning wheel of pain. And whenever I get the perpetually spinning wheel of pain I give up and launch a competitor.
  • The USAToday iPhone app has better interactive features. There’s a section called “snapshots” that has easy-to-read infographics and a “Vote Now” feature that takes advantage of the Internet format to get user feedback. They also have a weather report pulled in from the Weather Channel.
  • The Mobile News iPhone app has video. All its content is pulled from AP which is free, and essentially is a lot of the same content you’d read in other papers, so you may as well just go to the source.
  • The Bloomberg iPhone app has stock quotes and the ability to set up your own portfolio.

What would make the NYTimes iPhone app worth paying for?

The iPhone is a hot, trendy platform where people are paying for stuff. I used to subscribe to newspapers and read them during my commute. Now, I read news on my iPhone.

Or another way of putting it: I don’t want delivery of a dead tree to my doorstep; I want delivery to my iPhone. The news articles itself aren’t worth paying for. But a kick ass service that delivers the news in the format I want it - is. The iPhone app is the modern day equivalent of the obsolete paper boy.

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  • jcieplinski
    Great point. I remember when the Post Office started complaining that the Internet and email were killing the stamp business. But when your business model needs to change, you need to change it. The porn industry didn't cry about free and amateur pics and movies killing the skin mag business; they figured out a way to make money with the new medium. The dead tree pushers need to do the same. And the music, industry. Etc.
  • Yeah. It seems like the newspaper industry is finally realizing where
    readers have gone and what customers want, and is presently, putting a
    lot of effort into their respective websites. The problem is, it's
    taken so long for them to do it, that what with the recession, it's
    unlikely web advertising will make up the difference for their
    imploding print businesses. They should have gone full bore onto the
    web *years* ago.

    Now here's another, booming platform, the iPhone. We'll see how long
    it takes for the NYTimes to figure it out. It looks like USAToday and
    Bloomberg get it, which gives me some hope that some newspapers will
    survive the transition away from paper.
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