The New York Times has built up the cooking app, games (with the notable acquisition of Wordle this year), not to mention the acquisitions of Wirecutter and The Athletic.

Part of their 10 million subscriber goal was to create a digital subscription bundle that could be used in a number of parts of a customer lifestyle, a smart move that is paying off.  This led me to ask the question of whether this may spark a new trend. 

Legacy newspapers traditionally covered a lot of lifestyle areas beyond: TV guides, weather, classifieds, jobs, horoscopes, obituaries, and more. Yet the reliance on a newspaper seems to have decreased dramatically.

The Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford did a study of local news users. In the UK (left) there is a much heavier reliance on search/Internet and social than Norway (right), where local newspapers have held ground.  

Similarweb shows the top free iPhone app downloads in the category of news are not news brands as we would likely consider them:  

Here we can see there is a trend towards more single purpose apps such as Citizen and Police Scanner for crime and Nextdoor for community.  

This leads me to believe there are two main schools of thought:

1. A focus on news as a single purpose app. 
2. A focus on news adjacent products and services for growth (cooking, puzzles, information services are of note here).

Riske Betten at Mediahuis NL shared this slide during a presentation, showing that while they looked into different growth potential, the top “user needs” came out very news focused.

As she notes on box 6, it doesn’t mean they want it; it means that they think they don’t. So maybe as we understand customers better, try more things, and move more towards personalised experiences, we should add a third school of thought: an amalgamation of the above into a single feed based on the users needs.

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