Having caught up on my backlog of reading during lockdown, I decided to accept Apple’s offer of a free trial of their News+ service. The concept seems attractive for someone who would like to read widely without the great investment of time and money needed to take individual subscriptions to many publications. Unfortunately as I near the end of my month-long trial, I do not intend to continue with it.
The News+ “anchor-tenant” for current affairs in the UK is The Times. It had been my expectation that I could open the News+ app every day and peruse a digital newspaper, with all the in-depth articles and quality journalism that one gets that is so often missing from the 24/7 Internet news cycle. However the News+ service just seemed to give me access to a selection of online stories from The Times, with little to differentiate this offering from non-News+ providers such as The Evening Standard, The Independent or BBC News.
Some of these aforementioned providers have very aggressive advertising on their websites so even an advert-free reading experience would have potentially been a benefit, except News+ continues to display adverts, mostly terrible ones, in a way that seemed to maximise the interruption to the reading experience. In contrast, The Guardian app has the option to remove all adverts for £5.99 per month.
News+ also offer a selection of electronic magazines on a wide variety of topics. Some of these magazines are natively formatted for the app which offers a pleasing reading experience on screens both large and small (such as a phone). Sadly the majority I am interested in are just PDFs. Many local libraries (including my own) already offer free access to e-magazine services that include what are termed digital replicas of paper magazines so there is little incentive to subscribe just for the magazines.