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12/15/2014

More news outlets partner with aggregators as apps have tough time growing

From Nieman Journalism Lab

For a brief time, starting in 2010, the news industry convinced itself that it could put the toothpaste back in the tube, and Josh Quittner counted himself among the most optimistic. In April of that year, Apple began shipping the first model of the iPad, and before even the first unit sold it was already being hailed by some as print media’s savior. With the iPad’s high-quality screen and app-based ecosystem, publishers were actually going to have a platform on which to charge for content — and readers, unaccustomed to this new device, could be retrained to pay for their news. The consensus on this was so strong that Rupert Murdoch announced that his News Corp. would invest millions in launching an iPad-only publication called The Daily. Public relation flaks for magazine companies, after years with little good news to promulgate, furiously launched press releases announcing shiny new magazine apps that readers could soon purchase and download.

At the time, Quittner was director of digital editorial development for news, sports, and business at Time Inc., and he was placed in charge of leading the stable of magazines into this new digital frontier. “The first iPad magazines were Time magazines,” he told me recently. “I’m very much one of those people who believed that apps would give us another bite at the apple, that we could control the user experience to a far greater degree than we could on the web and that we could bring high quality advertising back.”

But even before the first issues arrived on the app store, he began to grow worried. Within Time Inc., there was a heated debate between the editorial product team and the business side over how to price the app. The business side, which ultimately won the argument, wanted to charge $4.99 per download, the newsstand price for the print issue. “What I believed was that we should totally charge for it, but we should charge the smallest amount possible,” he said. “Because this wasn’t even a beta technology — it was an alpha technology. We didn’t know which ways pages should turn, whether there should be a scroll or pagination. There were so many questions we didn’t know the answer to, and they were compounded by the fact that the download sizes were huge.”

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