The New York Times has announced that, as of today, it will no longer distribute articles on the Apple News app, making it one of the largest publishers to end its association with Apple’s publishing platform.
In a memorandum announcing the change, Meredith Kopit Levien, director of operations at the TimesHe said the company wants “a direct path to send those readers back to our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules.” He added that the “relationship of the newspaper with Apple News does not fit these parameters.”
While Apple has had a harder time getting publishers (including the Times) to sign in to your monthly News Plus subscription, which costs $ 9.99 per month and offers access to a variety of magazines and newspapers (including The Wall Street Journal, he Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Cabling, and more): The free version of Apple News has offered a much wider range of news. While the Times He only offered some free articles to Apple News, his departure still makes him one of the most important names to leave the Apple service since The Guardian left in 2017.
Apple News works differently than most other news aggregators: Top stories are selected by a team of human reporters, not algorithms, and Apple is strict about the news sources it allows in the app. Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that Apple News has more than 125 million daily users, although the company has not yet announced exactly how many subscribers pay for the premium Apple News Plus service.
For its part, Apple said in a statement to the Times that he “only offered Apple News a few stories a day,” so there shouldn’t be too much change in general content for readers. But since the media business is becoming an increasingly precarious market that has now shrunk further during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is possible that TimesThe defection could lead other publishers to seek to attack on their own as well.
