NYT Now Competes With Yahoo & Others

At SXSW, The New York Times announced a new app called NYT Now that looks set to compete with short-form, curated news apps like Yahoo’s Digest, Flipboard, and others. It’s an app that will, much like Yahoo, have a dedicated staff responsible for picking stories and editing them down for mobile consumption. The Times suggests that the stories will be more visual than their web content, featuring short paragraphs and bullet points to get the the meat of the story in fewer words. As well, the app will have an “Our Picks” tab that highlights other, editor-chosen content from around the web. There is also a Pocket-like “Save for Later” section that’s fairly self explanatory. The ultimate goal of the app is to get to a younger, mobile crowd that might not otherwise consider NYT as a news source. That said, the app is subscription based, with all this content available for $8/month, which includes access to full versions of stories featured on the app. Whether the price is too steep remains to be seen, but what’s clear is that publishers are responding to consumer demand for elegant mobile solutions to getting news – and, at its core, content – on the go.