The New York Times is expanding its mobile footprint. The Gray Lady announced today that it is launching its digital content on Flipboard to both Android and Kindle Fire tablets. The Times Flipboard content had previously only been available on the iPhone and iPad.
In conjunction with its new Kindle Fire and Android Flipboard streams comes the Times’ own particular blend of pay walled content. The top news section of the Times will be free but in order to access other content from the publication, a digital subscription is required. The Times offers its NYTimes.com with smartphone apps access for $3.75 a week billed every four weeks ($15 per month). To lure readers in, the Times offers the first four weeks for $0.99.
The Times continues to be a leader in monetizing digital content distribution on mobile devices, a problem that has plagued the news industry since the advent of Apple’s App Store in 2008. The publication has moved through the white space of the mobile distribution channels with iPhone and iPad apps, Windows Phone and Android and now a specific partnership with Flipboard on Android and Kindle Fire. The Times dubs its mobile distribution strategy “NYT Everywhere.”
From an aesthetic standpoint, the Gray Lady is still indeed… gray (the term Gray Lady was long ago applied to the New York Times because of its high ratio of print to graphics). Flipboard is an excellent app for showing off visual elements of online content but perusing the New York Times with the app still gives readers loads of text accompanied by the occasional picture.
The NYT Everywhere campaign is an interesting choice for the Times. Many publications are actually getting out of the native app game and going towards the mobile Web for distribution, creating sites that employ responsive design and HTML5. The Boston Globe has focused much of its mobile strategy on responsive design and The Financial Times infamously pulled its app from the Apple App Store and went 100% to the mobile Web. We at ReadWrite have also forsaken the native app route and built our site to be completely responsive.
How do you read your news? Do you go to a publications app or its mobile website? Do you use third-party apps like Zite, Pulse or Flipboard? Let us know in the comments.
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