NY Times to opt out of Apple News

The New York Times will be opting out of Apple News. New York Times COO Meredith Levien said, “It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms. And we’re reexamining them on three axes that are all interrelated, but different with each of the players.”

Levien focuses on three of the following aspects:

• “What role does the company play in helping bring audiences to the Times? Or said more technically, what role do they play in that funnel?”
• “What role does this company play in helping us do the main thing we’re trying to do? Which is scale direct relationships with people and get them to form a habit and ultimately pay.”
• “What’s the value equation — “recognizing that these companies get substantial value from our investment in original journalism”?

“All three of those things really matter,” says Levien. “At this moment, it doesn’t make sense for us to participate in Apple News anymore.”

She added:

“We’re really trying to deeply calibrate how do we cut our own top through that ecosystem in a way that accounts for its reality? That’s really what I’m describing to you. We get a little better with every passing year at how we do that. So that’s why you see us making a change like this.

“This has been a moment where something like 250 million — somewhere between 250 and 300 million people — used The New York Times at the height of the COVID crisis. When something like 6 in 10 American adults used The New York Times in March. And that’s a bigger opportunity than we’ve had before to drive relationships with people.

“Ultimately the thing we’re trying to do is play a bigger role in many more people’s lives. And I think with each passing year, we’re getting better and better at doing that ourselves. That doesn’t mean we don’t need distribution partners — we certainly do. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to find the outlets for our content that help us build audience. But I think that the equation for how we evaluate them changes.”

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