Apple’s all-you-can-read news subscription service said to cost $9.99 per month, but larger publishers are sitting out

“Apple is set to launch a new all-you-can-read news subscription service along with other services at a big event March 25,” Lucia Moses reports for Business Insider. “The name of the service hasn’t been made public, but it will be a relaunch of Next Issue Media’s news aggregation app Texture, which gives users access to around 200 magazine for a flat fee of $9.99 a month.”
“Apple’s pitch to publishers is that it will charge about $10 a month for what will amount to a premium tier of its existing Apple News app that’s baked into Apple mobile devices, according to knowledgeable sources,” Moses reports. “With the announcement less than a week away, Apple has been courting the major national newspapers but to date, The New York Times and The Washington Post have not joined, say people close to the situation. The Wall Street Journal is having productive talks with Apple and sees the service as a way to bring its journalism to a much bigger audience, say people familiar with its thinking.”
“‘No one wants an all-you-can-eat magazine service,’ said one digital publishing exec whose company isn’t participating in Apple’s service,” Moses reports. “even critics of the forthcoming service see some potential benefits. If Apple News users are ‘older, Middle America women,’ as many publishers refer to them broadly, a publication like the Journal has nothing to lose by being part of the bundle because such readers aren’t already likely to be subscribers. Conversely, a publisher that has a small or emerging online subscription business has little to lose by being part of a bundle.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll have to see exactly which publications Apple News Magazines offers before we can predict how it will fare at $9.99/month. If it’s part of a bundle, it may have a better chance of success.

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