The New York Times makes app NYT Now free
12 May 2015
The New York Times has launched NYT Now 2.0, an updated, version of it app NYT Now, for iPhone introduced last year as part of its push to make the paper's digital offerings more than just an online home for articles that appeared in the print edition.
Rather than recreate the print edition on the web, NYT Now was designed to make the paper's' journalism appealing and accessible to people who had never even considered picking up a paper at the newsstand. In the process of making the NYT friendly for the internet, the paper was looking to generate new subscriptions. In order to get the social media generation into the loop, a low-cost subscription, priced at $7.99 per month, was rolled out.
With the changes, the subscription model is being dumped and NYT Now was going free. The Verge quoted a representative from the paper as saying that the subscription numbers simply were not there, "We have seen very high engagement and retention among our NYT Now users, [but] we have not seen the number of subscriptions we were hoping for."
With the changes, iOS device users would get unfettered access to all posted articles, as against the $8 monthly fee charged for the service.
In addition to the fee update there were a few user interface modifications, which included a tweak that surfaced new articles to the top of user's feed for quick access to breaking news. A redesigned card-based UI cut clutter to current stories in a clear and concise manner.
Sharing features had also been strengthened, as users could now send screenshots of story summaries in-app.
Also, NYT Now was now compatible with password management app 1Password.
NYT Now is available as a free 15.2MB download from the iOS App Store.
