I was thinking of subscribing to Apple News+. At least testing it for free for a month.
I was curious about what is really included though. So I wrote the Wall Street Journal and asked, “Does a subscription via Apple News+ include access to the same articles as a subscription directly via the WSJ site?”
They replied, “The content surfaced on Apple News+ is different from the core WSJ offering. The Wall Street Journal Channel in Apple News+ will offer a curated collection of the Journal’s consumer-focused reporting.Please kindly note that complete access to the full range of WSJ articles, digital archives, features, and content available on WSJ.com and official WSJ applications, a separate paid subscription directly with The Wall Street Journal is required.”
Anyway, taking that into consideration.
Anybody here subscribe? What do you think? Is it worth it?
I think the articles that are shown by News+ are abridged. You do not have access to comments on the articles. This is based on me having News+ but also paying for some subscriptions and seeing the difference.
I subscribed about 6 months ago and immediately realized that publications only include some of their articles. If you’ve ever had a full digital subscription to a newspaper where you could actually read every page every day if you wanted to, it’s nothing like that at all. Some magazines have complete issues available though.
That said, although I already subscribe to a few major newspapers and magazines, I’m a news junkie and think the cost is worth it. Even though you don’t get full publications, it’s nice to be able to read some articles from newspapers all around the country and from lots of different magazines, both general purpose and more narrow or niche subjects.
edited: “all around the country” should have been “all around the world”!
Not a fan of subscriptions but my appreciation of Apple News+ has grown significantly over the last few years as I realized that it had more to offer than I previously thought. All content syncs with desktop and devices without issue. Plenty of times I don’t have time to read stories at the time I see the titles so I use “save story” a lot.
You asked WSJ a great question and I wonder the breadth and depth of other content sources on Apple News+ including magazines. I might be missing some content of the individual sources but I very much enjoy reading (and saving an individual subscription cost) for magazines such as MacLife, Flying, Plane & Pilot, Scientific American, Road & Track, Wired and others.
Can’t go wrong testing for free. I just wish they had an annual payment discount!
I should have mentioned my WSJ question in this thread instead of starting a new one. To tell the truth, I think Apple should be more upfront about that. The way they promote it makes it seem as though it’s the same as subscribing to all those publications. It seems deceptive.
Still, as you say, I can’t go wrong testing for free.
I use an annual payment discount for Apple Music. That would be good too.
I have concerns that Apple News will soon be curated (worldwide?) to meet Trumpist guidelines. I prefer to subscribe (either payment or RSS feed) to journals/newspapers which align with my biases.
Probably a good reason to have monthly instead of annual subscriptions. I unsubscribed from the Washington Post recently, but my annual subscription is still good until November. Yet, despite the controversy in the editorial section I see the news is still coming through clear and loud.
I was looking again at the Apple site and the way they word it is technically honest (I’m sure they had their lawyers review it) and creates a clever niche. Perhaps a bit high priced, but it’s interesting the way they phrase it.
It’s a win-win for the publications because most, if not all of them, even if they have a paywall usually allow a certain number of free article reads a month anyway. You would notice that if you ever visit Wall Street Journal, Time, Forbes, and other publications to read articles.
So the publications are gaining some extra income from non-full-subscribers without really losing their full subscribers. Apple is getting 50% of the subscription fees. And subscribers do get more access than the limited-reading paywalls, even if it’s less than complete access to the publications.
They created a clever subscription niche.
I’m going to try the one-month-free subscription just to see what it’s like.
I get complete access to The New Yorker, which basically pays for what an annual magazine delivery subscription costs. It is all the articles. (That said, I get News+ from Apple One, which gives the family 2 TB drive space, Apple Music, TV+, and I use Fitness+ pretty religiously. None of us use Arcade, but that’s there, too.)
I use the News app basically every day. It gives me enough of the WSJ - in fact, I can open a link to an article in Safari and share it to News and most of the time the article is there.
This is exactly why I subscribed to Apple News+. Anytime I get a clickbait article and the paywall fence materializes, I just go “Share → Open in News”, to read it in the News app, which saves me from having to subscribe to everything. (The Atlantic is one source that frequently shows up.) This works for about 99% of the articles, usually if it’s web content predating News+, it’s not accessible this way. (I work in higher ed, so if it’s really that old, I go plug it into our library’s article search instead.)
Not to mention the podcast content from Apple News, especially Apple News Today, while it usually cites/uses other sources, is now in my daily news podcast rotation.
I subscribe to both AppleNews+ and the WSJ separately for different reasons. AppleNews+ serves an excellent purpose of providing a broader, perhaps more well-rounded view of news content from publications around the country. That’s valuable to me, even if limited.
The WSJ provides less editorialized news reporting than any other publication I’ve read. It is no mystery why everyone from foreign governments to celebrities trusts the Journal to interview them and report in an unbiased manner. Their editorials are definitively conservative but they have an excellent “Chinese wall” between editorial and news content. In short, I trust them and so it is valuable to me from that perspective. It is expensive, no doubt, at $35/month, but if you are serious about getting unbiased news (editorials aside) it is, in my opinion, the best source.
Yes. In general, I’d say non-TV business media provides more objective news coverage than general news outlets and, especially, technology publications. I think this is because financial market professionals need to avoid ideology as much as possible when trading and making allocation decisions.
A less conservative alternative to the WSJ is Bloomberg. A bonus for Apple fans is Bloomberg is the home of Mark Gurman, a very well connected Apple reporter who writes both daily stories and a weekly newsletter. Plus according to the offers on their websites, the all-digital subscription price after the first year is lower for Bloomberg.
In addition to having a daily full copy and online subscriptions to the New York Times and the Economist, my husband and I have paper sized editions as well.
We both have backgrounds in print and digital publishing for more years than we care to admit we are old. He’s a journalist and I was in advertising. We both strongly agree that there is very often a big difference between the digital and paper.
I enjoy my News+ subscription which is included in my Apple One subscription, and I find it very useful. It does not include every story from newspapers – the papers would be unwilling to participate if it did because people could stop subscribing to their online editions. (Side note: The New York Times was originally a participant, but they stopped being in News+ in 2020 because they thought it was affecting their online subscription business) I have never seen an article that was “abridged” although it is possible, I suppose. (I think it unlikely since it would require editorial work by the publication.) Online comments, etc. are not included.
It is often useful when I get a link to a paywalled story. For example a story in the WSJ, which I do not subscribe to. I find that often, if I search for the headline in News+, the full story is there and I can read it.
(I do separately subscribe to the online version of The NY Times and the Washington Post.)
I have a full subscription to the NYT but I stopped my paper subscriptions to newspapers after the 3/11/2011 earthquake here in Tokyo when I felt I was getting all my important news a day late. I became more into reading today’s news online after that.
The Share Sheet for Safari includes an ‘Open in News’ item to see if paywalled articles are available in the News app.
Note that many publications allow subscribers to access an archive of issues and provide access to special programs. These features are unavailable to folks who access the publications only via News.
Unfortunately, this item does not appear on the Share Sheet for embedded browsers. So if you hit a paywalled link in something like Facebook or Bluesky, you have to first open the link in Safari/ system browser, and then get it passed off to News.
Bloomberg doesn’t appear to be included with Apple News+ though. If I try to read an article that shows up from within the News app it says a subscription to Bloomberg is needed.
