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I came across this article on Google News. I do no see the benefit of signing up for an Apple News subscription currently. Perhaps with the bundle but I do not subscribe to Apple TV + either unfortunately.
 
My library offers free access to a wide variety of popular magazines, for example I get the electronic addition of the Economist which saves me $100/yr. Why buy Apple News+?

An added bonus is ebooks, audiobooks, Acorn TV and the great Works sets as well. In the library I can use the computers to access a huge set of data bases to pull down articles, look up car service manuals, etc. I'm lucky my local library system has moved into the digital age.

Oh, I can still get printed books, DVDs/CDs and magazines as well.
 
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I don't think anyone in my household would give Apple TV Plus even a momentary glance. But as soon as Disney+ was available my wife was like shut up and take my money! I'll admit some of the shows on Apple TV Plus look interesting but not enough to join. Including Disney+ we have several paid for TV services and don't have the budget or time for more - Apple is too late to this game and does not have the impressive library like Disney+ to entice folks like us.

So far we are loving Disney+. Can't wait to watch the Mandalorian as well.

While I was signing up for Disney+ on Tuesday, my brother called to tell me how great it was and that I need to sign up for it right now, he thought there was a chance I didn't know about it. I binged for 12 hours straight. Pretty much everyone I know has it. My father-in-law wants to retire right now to be able to spend more time with it, he loves the old back catalog. For the past 2 days my family has seemed to rename our AppleTV the "Disney box", as in "Turn on the Disney box".

Mandalorian is fantastic. Apple should be embarrassed to dump their steaming pile of original content into the same market. I have spoken.

And I say all this as someone who strongly dislikes Disney for their lobbying and screwing over the public domain as well as their general business practices. I never thought I'd buy anything from them, but this is just a complete shut up and and take my money service.

Meanwhile I haven't even signed up for my free year of Apple TV+, nothing looks remotely appealing, and I don't know anyone outside this forum who admits to having it. I will have a look at the Foundation series when we get more info, but so far Apple TV+ is 100% trash to me.
 
Samsung tried this in Android with a free news feed app Flipboard as one of its Home Screen (pushed hard enough) but I think most people didn’t even bother to use them.

Now Apple offering similar type of service for a hefty monthly subscription!

Beyond Apple Music I don’t find its subscriptions services are wonderful! They try to push iCloud but it makes sense only if your family members have iPhones otherwise it will be either wasteful or too expensive!
 
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Not surprised, the very idea of a newspaper and magazine sub service sounds like something that belongs in a pre-2010 era.
 
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It's REALLY expensive and the reading experience of magazines is poor.

Only when the magazines aren't formatted for the medium. They should remove those 'PDF' style magazines from the store and not allow it in my opinion.

Not surprised, the very idea of a newspaper and magazine sub service sounds like something that belongs in a pre-2010 era.

I don't entirely agree, I think there is value to proper content.
 
I've been a paying customer since one and while I don't read many of the magazines, the price is worth it for some of the trade magazines.

I don't think it's "that people don't read", everybody reads online, but just not the format Apple News is using. Most users would probably prefer a much richer experience, not just PDF looking pages. It needs to be more dynamic and easy for you to open a news story in Chrome or something besides Safari. It would also be awesome if paysites would see you have an Apple News account and let you log in or something.

The idea is good enough, but for Apple News to become great, it needs to match the best blogs out there with videos, animation etc. The problem for most magazines is that they probably don't have the budget to be more than print mag.
 
The same people that read books, I think. Even before the internet it was true that 10% of the population did/does 90% of the reading. (It may not be precisely 90/10, but the point is valid.)

I think “free” news is bad because it’s full of the worst kinds of bias, it takes much longer to read and navigate through, it’s annoying to read and navigate through, and generally the quality is really subpar. It’s a terrible use of your time if you consider news to be worth anything and you work a job to make money.

It is scary that so many people would rather consume the fast food equivalent of news than pay a few bucks to spend their time with the best journalism and reporting our civilization offers.

I don’t blame people 100%. Sort of how I don’t think people are 100% at fault for the negative effects that come from a society that markets and pushes so much fast food. Individually, we all must take responsibility, but it’s helpful to try to look out for others—like the old and the young. Just look at what old people are consuming for news! The Fox News (and CNN, etc.) demographic skews quite old, and they people can be dangerous. Just look at what has happened to our current political reality.

You can’t touch the quality found in magazines and books that require payment to view. Apple News should provide a better gateway to this high quality (healthy) information. It’s a damn shame that Apple isn’t doing more to help keep society educated. That they simply sit on this *massive* opportunity speaks loudly for their priorities. 🤷‍♂️
I agree with you in terms of Free vs Paid news but.. there is no equivalent of Spotify/Apple Music in reading industry and I do not think it will ever be..
 
UK News+ subscriber here. So far I’m conflicted with the service, although I’ve gone past the free 1 month trial and am now paying.

At it’s best, the service has some terrific content presented in a reflowable manner. Time magazine works very well indeed on my 10.5 iPad Pro and shrinks down and reformat itself well on my iPhone 11 Pro. The PDF based back issues are another matter though. They’re just about manageable and readable on my iPad; I’ve given up even trying anything PDF based on my iPhone though. The experience is terrible.

The problem is that News+ only has a few months of back issues of most magazines. And hardly any of the magazines were displayed in the new “revolutionary” format. They’re just poor quality PDFs. After 1 month free, most people realized there’s nothing new about this subscription service. This needed a 1 year trial like TV+ to give the service time to grow.

I’m hoping that more and more magazines in the service will move to the dynamic reflowing model. Like Apple Music, iCloud Storage, Apple Arcade and ATV+ I’m sharing my News+ subscription with my family. Unlike the rest of my family I’m the only one with an iPad, everyone else is on a phone (Xr & SE). I initially though the gaming magazines would be of interest to my son (EDGE, Xbox monthly etc) but the reading PDFs on his SE is a complete non-starter.

Question is, will the content providers stick it out given likely subscriber numbers and anticipated financial returns?

I recently subscribed, and in the U.K. the content is decent. The app could be better but its usable.
I follow several magazines and it also has The Times here too which is pretty expensive on its own as a digital sub. I’m not sure we get all the content however for that newspaper, but it’s still decent enough.
Basically it saves me money, and I pick up a few magazines I didn’t already subscribe to. I’m a happy subscriber and I think it’s worth it.

I already have a monthly digital subscription to another UK broadsheet for my daily news fix. I was hoping that The Times content would be broadly equivalent to a full subscription - it most definitely is not. Going into News+ > The Times > News, there is current news but everything that could be construed as politically partisan (either way) is simply not featured. This is made all the more stark given the impending general election. Not sure if this is the content provider holding this ‘prime’ content back for its own subscription service, or if this is an editorial decision being taken my Apple’s editorial team.

On balance, I’ll likely continue with my News+ subscription. The daily/current news side doesn’t really compete with a full digital newspaper subscription elsewhere, but the magazine content is enough and well presented enough to be worth my while.

Lastly, for those asking why news should be paid for when it can be got free elsewhere, or decrying the entirety of the established media as ‘fake new’, I’d like to quote an answer given by Yuval Noah Harari on the matter.

You say if you want good information, pay good money for it. The Silicon Valley adage is information wants to be free, and to some extent the online newspaper industry has followed that. Is that wise?

The idea of free information is extremely dangerous when it comes to the news industry. If there’s so much free information out there, how do you get people’s attention? This becomes the real commodity. At present there is an incentive in order to get your attention – and then sell it to advertisers and politicians and so forth – to create more and more sensational stories, irrespective of truth or relevance. Some of the fake news comes from manipulation by Russian hackers but much of it is simply because of the wrong incentive structure. There is no penalty for creating a sensational story that is not true. We’re willing to pay for high quality food and clothes and cars, so why not high quality information?”
 
You are clearly ignorant of public opinion or a journalist, also ignorant.

Very nice arguments, I like it, keep up the level of highly intelligent points, these are almost indestructible! Also, sorry, I couldn’t not read your sentence in Mr. Jackso....Mr. Jeferosons voice from South Park ”No..that’s ignorant, stop being ignorant” 😂
 
Looks like my predictions of this being Newstand v2 was spot on.

If this is going to gain any traction at all, start by forcing magazines to be published in the new interactive format only. These garbage static PDFs make the UX maddening. People do not want to read this way.


I'm right with you on that one, though the wife and I have been debating the subject at length. - she's wrong of course :D

I much prefer it when the magazines I read have adapted to the format of the device I am using, none of this pinching in and out nonsense. For some reason though, my wife is the complete opposite. She much preferred the more static scanned PDF style of the Readly app we had been using prior to Apple News+. Honestly, for being 10 years younger than me she's very old-fashioned with some things for her age.
 
It’s very difficult when you’re not interested in the majority of the magazines they offer. I need a UI that allows me to select the magazines I’m interested in and excludes the magazines that I don’t care to read.

The app needs to track what newspapers and magazines I care about, filter out what I don’t, track what I’ve read and what I haven’t read, alert me when there’s a new issue and to exclude issues I’ve read some or all of and no longer wish to see.

With standard print subscriptions you receive the magazines and newspapers you want, you can set the issues aside, read them when you want and toss them out once you’re done with them.

Apple needs to reproduce this experience. I want to filter out magazines I don’t care about, filter out issues of magazines I’m done with, see when new issues are available and be informed when new magazines or newspapers are added as options so I can decide if I want to see them or not.

Listing all newspapers and magazines alphabetically is useless outside of using that initial list of everything they have to let the app know what I care about and what I don’t.

That’s the problem with News+. There is plenty of content but there is no way to filter out newspapers and magazines I don’t want to see.


I don't wish for this to sound condescending, but have you gone through the magazines and clicked on "Follow" for the ones you are interested in reading?

Once you've done this it does almost everything you ask for. When you go into the News+ Tab, all of the publications you are interested in are listed right along the top of the page, you can just ignore everything else below that if you please.
Tap on See All to view all of your followed publications, it only displays two issues of the same publication when they are within the same month, such as November is still available in November, even though later that month the December issue comes out.

You can still browse all of the back issues should you wish, by tapping on ... likewise, by again tapping on ... you can remove an issue you have read from all of your devices if it doesn't disappear quickly enough for you (it will still be available in back issues). Whenever a new issue of one of your followed publications is released, you receive a notification if you have set those up.
 
Apple in 2019 has become more of media company than a tech company. It’s time they revise many of there aging gadgets i.e iMac, iPad mini etc rather than the digital content.
 
I agree with you in terms of Free vs Paid news but.. there is no equivalent of Spotify/Apple Music in reading industry and I do not think it will ever be..
Digital "newsstand"-like subscriptions have been around for at least a decade, ie what Apple News is.
 
Tbh, when using Apple news, I click on probably 1 article a day that requires news+ - I'm not going to pay a monthly sub to read 1 article a day!

On a related note, has anyone else noticed how obnoxious the ads have gotten in the News app recently?
 
When I got my first iPad I tried to read magazines on it. To put it plainly it sucked.

Nowadays I don't even care. Most magazines I bought were car magazines and Youtube is full of amazing content about that.
 
Three words.... Not enough content. Viewers can probably watch all of the content they have in less than a week or two. Oh, sorry, I thought this was about Apple TV. My bad. : )
Sounds about like Netflix too since you have to sift through all the garbage there.
 
Too expensive and not enough content. Eddy Cue's motto.
Another Eddy Cue-ism...
--It's going to grow and there will be more offerings.
It looks exactly the same to me as when it launched.
Like everything else, once it is launched, they forget about it.
It would have been nice for Tim to give an update at the last presentation.
The silence is deafening.
 
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