Apple News+ Provides Premium Magazine Content for Just $120 a Year

Apple announced a range of new services this week including a subscription video streaming service Apple TV+ and the Apple Credit Card. It also released a new magazine subscription service that should really interest avid readers. Apple News+ adds magazines to its already popular Apple News App.

SEE ALSO: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT APPLE NEWS PLUS

For $9.99 per month, users can access over 300 magazines, such as The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Men’s Health, and Vogue. Apple says its service will be “the only place” where you’ll be able to get all of them at once. Apple wants to put emphasis on high rotation, high-quality newspapers and magazines placing an emphasis on ‘trust’ in this era of fake news and ‘alternative facts’.

Apple fights fake news

“We’re committed to supporting quality journalism, and with Apple News+, we want to celebrate the great work being done by magazines and news outlets,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News. “We think the breadth and quality of publications within Apple News+ will encourage more people to discover stories and titles they may never have come across before.”

Exactly what you’ll get with an Apple News+ subscription is unknown, but the Wall Street Journal provides some insight. According to an internal memo from Dow Jones, obtained by The Verge the MSJ will provide “a specially curated collection of general interest news from The Wall Street Journal” to Apple News Plus subscribers. The Wall Street Journal is famous for its business reporting and analysis which would be left out of this deall.

Exclusive deals reshape content

“We are proud to work with Apple, a company that believes in the profound importance of journalism and journalists,” said Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp.

“The Wall Street Journal is certainly the most trusted newspaper in the US and its coverage of politics, business, economics, national news and lifestyle issues is nonpareil. We expect through the Apple platform, our journalism will reach and inform many more millions of readers, viewers and listeners around the country and the world.”

Other magazines may not be so limited and might provide more comprehensive content. Unlike its video streaming service, Apple doesn’t have too many competitors for its News app. If you are an iPhone user it makes sense to use the product made by the phone users. For Android users there a plethora of choices from Google news to Flipboard.

Samsung develops rival app

But Samsung has also created its own news curation app specific for their own devices. The Samsung Upday app acts as a curated aggregator, selecting in stories from different news sources like the Daily Mirror, the Guardian and the BBC in a way similar to Apple News.

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The app is preinstalled on new Samsung devices and while it currently only has 11 million users, it hasn’t launched in the US yet. Apple news has approximately 70 million users according to 2016 stats.

Both services have an emphasis on high-quality news and currently, share news sources. In the future, more exclusive content deals might get down that limits which device users see what. To subscribe to all of the content available on Apple News+ would cost a user more than $8000 annually. So for an avid magazine and newspaper consumer $9.99 per month is a great deal.

Even better family sharing is allowed so more than one user can personalize their content choices. The United States and Canada will be the first to enjoy the new service with Australia and the UK to follow in the fall of this year. The rest of Europe is expected to be rolled before the end of 2019.