Mozilla’s Working on Subscription News Service

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Apple News+ has not been popular. Perhaps that’s because it features few newspapers. Could it be because its sloppy interface makes finding and reading magazine articles a chore? Perhaps long form journalism is dying. Or maybe journalists just want to get paid. My guess? This has more to do with people being unable to find what they want than anything else. People want more news articles, and they want to be able to bookmark longer magazine articles as well, but Apple doesn’t allow users to do this. Even Leaf and Core allows you to bookmark a subheading to read later!

There’s more than enough space here for a competitor to come in and do this right. That’s what Mozilla hopes to be. They’re partnering with Scroll to bring ad-free premium news websites to users for just $5/month. You’ll be able to read your news and long-form articles in your browser or in an app for a low price. It sounds like it could be everything Apple News+ should have been.

Mozilla’s News Reader

Mozilla’s news reader could be built into their Firefox browser or part of a separate app or service. It promises you can save news stories from anywhere, browse ad-free content, pick up where you left off, get audio versions of articles, and curation and suggestions. Basically? It addresses all the complaints of Apple News. Even the price. Mozilla’s service will be just $5/month. This may allow it to reach more consumers.

Content?

We don’t yet know what kind of content Mozilla will offer. Will they allow us to peek behind paywalls of large newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times? What about Magazine articles, like those from National Geographic? Many of these will likely remain exclusive to Apple News+.

However, publishers have been unhappy with Apple News+. They’re not seeing the kind of revenue they expected, it can be hard to convert magazine content into Apple’s format, and the PDFs of pages are inadequate. Basically put, no one’s happy with Apple News+. Those exclusive partnerships likely won’t last much longer than any contract they may have currently.

Once Mozilla’s service has taken off, and, if it has taken hold, they’ll be eager to find new revenue sources. Those publishers may see the success of Mozilla’s news service and go over to them.

Journalism’s In Trouble

Journalism is in trouble. Fake news spreads like wildfire, taking advantage of people’s fears and political biases to drive traffic to their website (take your medicine: block fake news). Real news, however, is often less inflammatory. Traffic is down, and fake news or incendiary news sites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire draw in readers more easily. Meanwhile, people aren’t subscribing to newspapers anymore, subscriptions to online papers are down as well, and people expect their online content to be free. As a result, legitimate news sources are struggling to make ends meet.

Individual websites can’t ask you to subscribe to them. No one’s willing to shell out $15/month for the NY Times, $10/month, for The Washington Post, and $20/month for the Wall Street Journal, or $8/month to the LA Times. That adds up.

Apple News+ isn’t cutting it. Brave could be a viable option, but it relies on cryptocurrency and is ran by a homophobic bigot who donates profits to anti-LGBTQ groups. Really, nothing currently exists that brings your news together for a low price, allowing people to pay for good journalism.

Mozilla News+?

When will Mozilla’s news service launch? They haven’t said yet. In fact, Mozilla has been light on details. It seems as though they’re trying to gauge interest. I’m a news fiend, but if I subscribed to every news service I wanted to, I’d be out $50+ a month. That’s just too much for me. But, if Mozilla can provide premium content at a lower price, it just might save journalism, and I’m very interested in that, Mozilla.

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Sources:

• Mozilla
• Amber Neely, AppleInsider