The New York Times iPhone and iPad app has just received an update that allows users to subscribe via in-app purchase. Changes were made to many in-app subscription services after Apple changed the guidelines. The New York Times is one of many news publications that were affected by the changes. The update will now allow users to choose from three new in-app purchase schemes –

• $15 – iPhone + web content
• $20 – iPad + web content
• $35 – All access (iPhone, iPad, and web)

These fees will be on a monthly basis and will recur as long as you’re subscribed. This is similar to how other online publications have recently dealt with many of Apple’s subscription policy changes. Anyone planning on buying into the new subscription model NYT is offering?

[Mac Stories]

The New York Times will start charging readers a subscription fee to access some of it’s content, effective immediately in Canada and starting on March 28 in the US and globally. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of The New York Times, said:

Our decision to begin charging for digital access will result in another source of revenue, strengthening our ability to continue to invest in the journalism and digital innovation on which our readers have come to depend. This move will enhance The Times’s position as a source of trustworthy news, information and high-quality opinion for many years to come.

Here’s a breakdown of the new digital subscription model.

• All users of NYTimes.com are able to enjoy 20 articles at no charge each month (including slideshows, videos and other forms of content). Beyond 20 articles and for open access to the site, users will be asked to become digital subscribers.
• On The Times’s smartphone and tablet applications, the Top News section will remain free. To delve deeper into the apps’ other sections, users will be asked to become digital subscribers.
• The Times is offering three digital subscription packages that allow users to choose the devices on which they want to access Times content. NYTimes.com will be included as part of any subscription.
• All New York Times home delivery newspaper subscribers receive free, unlimited access to NYTimes.com and the full content on all of The Times’s applications.
• Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media will be able to access those individual articles, even if they have reached their reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.
• The homepage at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times.

Access to The Times’ iPhone app runs $15 every 4 weeks, the iPad app costs $20 every 4 weeks, and a subscription to both devices is whopping $35 every 4 weeks. In keeping with Apple’s new subscription policy, The New York Times will begin using in-app purchase by June 30.

Anyone planning on signing up?

[The New York Times Company]

News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly said he sees a bright future for iPad and iPad-like devices when it comes to media consumption, and now there’s a rumor he might launch a unit specifically to target the new, digital, mobile age. Could existing News Corp properties like Wall Street Journal and New York Times soon be joined by a new generation of publications?

Sources close to the company tell me that the company is considering creating a new purely digital news play that would be designed for the app world and would be available through subscription on devices like the iPad.

This new digital news venture would incorporate text, photo and video, tailored for the iTunes app format …. neither a newspaper nor a news website — it would not be based on any of News Corp’s existing papers.

Of course, publishers and Apple are reportedly still at odds over how to handle subscription pricing, and there’s still a huge disconnect between publishers and consumers when it comes to packaging and pricing (iPad versions shouldn’t cost more than print versions, right?), so the future it does come slowly…

[CNBC via MacRumors]

The Pulse RSS reader for iPad, featured just yesterday during Steve Jobs’ WWDC 2010 keynote, is reportedly being removed from the iTunes App Store following a copyright complaint from the New York Times/The Boston Globe.

The gist of their demand letter is that Pulse comes pre-loaded with the NYTimes.com RSS feed and features it in screen shots, is a paid app, and thus commercially using their RSS feeds, and that it reframes the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites, both of which the New York Times Company says is in violation of their copyright.

Pulse was written by two Stanford grad students, whom we’re guessing have far fewer legal resources than the New York Times Company, but are now in a position where they have to answer the copyright violation charge and/or modify their app to no longer violate the copyright.

Now, Pulse wasn’t scraping or stealing RSS content in the traditionally frowned-upon way — they’re an RSS reader like many, many others both on the desktop and on mobile devices. Was the only difference it’s high profile thanks to WWDC and a previous feature in the New York Times itself? If so, what does this mean for other RSS readers?

[Boom Town, image via New York Times]

How much are you willing to pay for magazine and newspaper subscriptions on the iPad? That’s a question publishers like the New York Times are literally fighting over, according to Valley Wag.

In their specific case, the old guard in “print” want to charge $20-$30 a month to access the paper online via the New York Times app shown off during last month’s iPad announcement. Seems they’re afraid it will cut into the traditional print-it, fold-it, put-it-on-a-truck-and-ship-it business. The folks in “digital”, however, want to charge $10 since, you know, you don’t have to print, fold, or drive it around to get it to the readers (cost for paper and fuel is zero).

That’s just the NYT, mind you. While Apple is releasing a standardized, iTunes-based iBooks Store for the iPad, they haven’t offered anything similar for newspapers or magazines (yet), meaning even if the Times settles on one model, the Washington Post (or whomever) could settle on something completely different. Atypically confusing for an Apple platform, isn’t it?

And either way, there’s really no precedent as to whether or not people will pay $10 a month for a digital newspaper, let alone $20 or $30. They certainly will for real world newspapers they can hold in their hand and share around the house and office, but for digital?

Some magazines, like Wired, are showing off and discussing concepts of what their digital version will look like (see their non-iPhone friendly video, after the jump), perhaps hoping the richer, multimedia experience will create a greater perception of value.

While people are used to free content on the web (Wall Street Journal aside), convenience and ease of use did get some off the file-sharing and onto iTunes Music. Could the same work for print? And what price point will let them stay in business and let us keep reading their content?

How much are you willing to pay to read the New York Times or Wired from the comfort of your iPad?

The New York Times had a huge, gushing, front-page-of-the-business-section story this weekend about the iPhone App Store titled Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now.

Now the App Store, with over 100,000 apps and 2 billion downloads is a runaway success, no doubt about it, but given the continued problems with developer relations and capricious approval processes, seeing Apple Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller, and VP of iTunes Eddy Cue, attack public relations via the New York Times, and not help restore faith the developers via a come-to-jesus-phone open and honest airing of grievances and non-opaque plans for improvement just comes off as… awkward (and perhaps a tad insulting). And the New York Times — really? If you don’t have the guts to go for the story and ask the tough questions of Apple, who’s left?

Anyway, here’s what we did get from the Apple brass:

There’s a 24″ (20 LED screen) display in the lobby of 1 Infinite Loop displaying 20,000 top-selling app icons, and each time one is bought, its icon jiggles and ripples the adjacent icons. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

First up, Schiller says the review process is a necessary evil to ensure customers trust that apps won’t crash their iPhones, steal their data, or contain illegal content, and that most apps just sail through the process. They received 10,000 apps a week.

“I absolutely think this is the future of great software development and distribution. The idea that anyone, all the way from an individual to a large company, can create software that is innovative and be carried around in a customer’s pocket is just exploding. It’s a breakthrough, and that is the future, and every software developer sees it.”

“I think, by and large, we do a very good job there. Sometimes we make a judgment call both ways, that people give us feedback on, either rejecting something that perhaps on second consideration shouldn’t be, or accepting something that on second consideration shouldn’t be.”

“We care deeply about the feedback, both good and bad,” he says. “While there are some complaints, they are just a small fraction of what happens in the process.”

“Our goal is very simple: We want to have the best platform for applications that there has ever been on any product. We know we’re not perfect, but we know we’re better than anything else that has been and we want to keep improving it.”

Apple is typically considered to be a perfectionist when it comes to aesthetic and experience, however, so a “good enough” argument is hard to process — that small fraction should be keeping Steve Jobs up at night.

The Times does mention the controversies and offers some developer comments about apps almost a year in limbo, and large gaming companies being treated the same as hobbyists. They also cover the jailbreak alternative. When it comes to Cue, however, we get:

“A rocket ship is even too small of an analogy. We’ve been able to leverage a lot of our iTunes technology for the App Store. But it’s completely different. We’re reviewing all of those apps. We really don’t have to review each and every song.”

Apple told the Times they’re “trying” (?) to increase the number of reviewers and streamline the process.

Check out the full article, which also features RIM/BlackBerry, Palm, Microsoft, and Google’s take on the App Store and apps in general. And let us know what you think!

Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, when discussing the evolution/revolution underway in the print media industry, mentioned off-the-record and in passing:

“I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate…”

And so the question becomes, was this an unintentional leak based upon content discussions the NYT has been having with Apple, or is Keller — like all of us — just so inculcated with speculation about the near-mythic Apple iTablet that he — like all of us — speaks as though it’s inevitable?

[via Gawker, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple comes the return of Fake Steve to the interwebs. Fake Steve also returns to being bitingly satirical, something that had been lacking before its own hiatus. Recent gems include the excoriation of the New York Times, and lambasting Palm (twice) for focusing on Apple rather than the Pre in their own advertisements:

Do you remember what the ads for the original iPhone looked like? You remember seeing anything in those ads about the BlackBerry or the Treo? No. It was a whole new thing — sui generis, as the French say. It had to be. If all we could do was to make a slightly less s****y BlackBerry, and offer it for a few bucks less than what RIM was charging, we would not have bothered to make the product.

(Though he may be reaching in his claims of just how far Jon Rubinstein will go to be like “him”.)

If you’re easily offended, stay clear. Otherwise, enjoy it while it lasts…

Earlier this month, TiPb threw it’s hat in the ring of next generation handset speculation by predicting Apple would announce an iPhone HD in 2009. It just made sense to us, and apparently it’s beginning to make sense to others as well.

What happened? New York Times writer John Markoff dropped a rumor bomb:

The [unnamed search engine] company spotted Web visits from an unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. Is it the iPhone 3.0 or the NetMac 1.0?

Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo seems to be thinking what we’re thinking as well:

here in Gizmodo we are thinking about an iPhone HD with an updated 800 x 480 pixel display, probably coming in 2009.

So, is this just another wunderkind spoofing his or her web browser for lulz and chaos? Or is Steve Jobs already carrying around the prototype iPhone HD in his pocket, practicing the Keynote Boom! for WWDC 2009?

Seems it wasn’t a hair that broke the blogerati’s back, it was an App. Or more precisely, it was Apple’s denial of the Podcaster App that let loose the floodgates of negative internet reaction. Or even more precisely, it is the continued lack of certainty among developers as to what can and will be denied by Apple, leading many to reconsider the return on investment of hours upon hours of coding with 11th hour rejection hanging perpetually over their heads, like a virtual Sword of Damocles.

According to Read Write Web, Podcaster will be turning to Ad Hoc to distribute their App for nowwhile everyone from Daring Fireball to Roughly Drafted cover (and in some cases, recover from) the various comments and implications flinging back and forth across the blogsphere, the New York Times has decided to escalate the attention level:

I can’t see how distributing the program will hurt Apple. If anything it will make the iPhone a tad more valuable. On the other hand, treating developers capriciously is most certainly going to discourage them from spending nights and weekends working on new and useful applications that may give more people reasons to buy an iPhone.

Sure, the App Store is growing twice as fast as iTunes Music (though starting from zero is an easy way to generate an opening curve), and may well hit a billion units moved by 2009, but with Android’s open marketplace on the horizon, and Microsoft me-too’ing their way in with Skymarket, there could be alternatives. If Apple doesn’t take a page from their MobileMe fiasco playbook and rapidly standardize and clarify the rules of the game, they could lose their early lead. And that could cost them the Mobile Internet Platform dominance they so currently crave.

Don’t get us wrong. It’s Apple’s platform and they, like a Nintendo with the Wii, have the absolute right to approve or deny anything developed for their platform. But developers have the same right to stop developing for a platform they don’t think serves their best interests. And consumers have the same right to stop buying it for the same reason. As with the Blacklist push-back, that will be the ultimate officiator of this debate.

And a terse one-line email from Steve may not fix things if Apple waits too long…