by From the moment the App Store launched, The New York Times has been at the forefront of the digital newspaper revolution. There’s been a constant stream of apps and subscriptions, but for the most part, its initiatives have revolved around an unimaginative repackaging of the paper. With NYT Now, the Gray Lady seems to have figured out a formula that may pay off. Rather than delivering a rich stew teeming with every subject it has to offer, the app serves as sort of a greatest hits package, aimed at casual readers who might not have such a ravenous news appetite.
The app does well to keep the general look and feel of the Times website intact, but everything is presented in a more traditional mobile fashion, which has its drawbacks. The main page consists of an occasional daily briefing—where you can quickly scan a smattering of stories across a variety of topics—along with a current list of articles handpicked by the Times’ editors.
Navigation is mostly accomplished by scrolling, but there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the importance of one story over another; on the web, there’s a clear hierarchy of news that isn’t quite as obvious in the app, despite its top-to-bottom layout. Articles can be easily bookmarked and shared, but any related videos and galleries that appear on the main page strangely aren’t packaged in the story view.
With such a stripped-down interface, we expected to get a condensed summary when clicking on a story, but that’s not the case—subscribers get access to the full stories as they appear on the Times’ site, reformatted in a neat Instapaper-like presentation. So while the content may be limited, the $7.99 monthly subscription presents a decent value based on word count alone. However, its target audience probably doesn’t want to scroll through a thousand words on the Korean ferry crash, so we’d like to see a cheaper (or free) version that lifts the 10-article limit and offers edited versions of stories.
The bottom line. NYT Now is the Times’ best effort to date to reach the mobile generation, but it’s still a bit more iterative than innovative.
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