The New York Times Pulls Out of Apple News

Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas, reporting for The New York Times:

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”

The Times mobile app is pretty bad in a bunch of ways. I keep giving it a try and keep running back to reading the Times on the web. That’s neither here nor there, perhaps — I don’t think the Apple News app is all that good either.

“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”

An Apple spokesman said that The Times “only offered Apple News a few stories a day,” and that the company would continue to provide readers with trusted information from thousands of publishers.

The Times never really embraced Apple News. And it’s worth pointing out that this has nothing to do with Apple News+ — Apple’s subscription offering. The Times was never part of News+ and what they’re doing now is pulling out of the free part of Apple News. Times articles will no longer be in Apple News at all.

I think it’s fair to say that the Times’s approach to Apple News is a lot like Netflix’s approach to Apple TV — neither wants to be a small part of a larger bundled subscription offering or even a bundled user interface. And they might both be right — both are in rarefied positions to serve as bundled offerings in and of themselves.

★ Monday, 29 June 2020