It’s an ambitious launch. Within it, we can hear many of the digital news buzzwords of the moment: mobile first, curation, paywall, native ads, voice. NYT Now debuts on April 2, side-stepping the foolish superstitions of a day earlier, and about five months after first disclosing its Paywalls 2.0 plans (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″).
NYT Now’s timing seems right, and in my first testing of it, it offers reasons to believe it’ll get a lot of usage. But big questions loom as the final preparations for launch are made within the Times. The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay. There are also questions about how NYT Now fits with the Times’ other native apps and mobile web experiences.
The positioning of the app shows the resurgent Times’ confidence, bolstered by the “They like us, they really like us!” success of the Times’three-year-old digital subscriptionstrategy. In fact, NYT Now can be seen in part as an Empire Strikes Back play: It aims to take readership back from Twitter and Facebook. It is an offensive move from a company — and an industry — that has seemed to be playing defense for so long.
“It’s the best Twitter feed I’ve ever seen,” one NYT Now tester told the team building the product, says Cliff Levy, the editor of NYT Now and a well-decoratedand well-respected Timesman. That’s part of the idea: Take minutes of news usage back from Twitter and Facebook by offering a somewhat open but still corralled experience. NYT Now aims to take back that usage at the critical early-morning check-in times and later in the day, when data shows even news readers tend to migrate to social and games. How much of the world really wants a lassoing of content, bringing some finiteness to the infinity of news and opinion out there?
We know that Twitter faces its own issues of relevance, of user experience, and of how to help its users make sense of the madding digital world; just recently, the company acknowledged loss of minutes and new signups because it’s too complicated for many users. How NYT Now will try to bring simplicity to the complexity is the question. Let’s consider NYT Now in four quick parts: the product, its journalism, its user experience, and its business strategy.
The product
The product is straightforward. It’s mobile-only and, at launch, iPhone-only. On Android, the Times says, “We’re looking at it.” There’s no tablet or web access. As mobile usage surges past 50 percent in some parts of the day and week for the Times and other news companies, NYT Now aims to exploit the compulsive, near-OCD check-in behavior of 2014 life.
The app will be a standard, standalone iPhone app, not part of Apple’s Newsstand, where the Times’ core iOS app lives. Download the app and you get 10 free articles a month — the same way metered access works on the other Times’ digital products. The price is $2 a week or $8 for four weeks.
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