Times Reader 2.0: Free for NYTimes Home Delivery Subscribers

Welcome to the Future. Your newspaper is here. This is the cliché and soon-to-be-outmoded catch phrase in the minimalist advertisement for the Times Reader 2.0.

The New York Times has released a fancy but singular version of an RSS reader with a clean, user-friendly interface, powered by Adobe Air. At $14.95 a month, it is quite costly given that all articles available on the reader are also available for free on the Times website in their entirety. All you end up paying for is an application, only slightly more accessible than most other RSS readers.

As a paid subscriber to the Sunday Home Delivery edition, I was able to download the reader for free. I appreciate the “Most E-Mailed” feature that allows me to see the most emailed articles for each day, updated every 15 minutes. (At nytimes.com, the “Most E-Mailed” lists show the most emailed articles within a specific time frame rather than from a specific date.) Also noteworthy is the inclusion of the Daily Crossword that can be filled out within the application. A brief video demo of the reader is available here.

The order of the categories in the left navigation column is slightly random. For example, Obituaries immediately follows Front Page, International, and National, but precedes Opinion. Upon further exploration, sections that appear only on a specific day in print (e.g. Health, Science, or Weddings) also appear only under that day on the reader.

If the New York Times decision-makers believe their future lies in this software, they need to make it worth $179.40 a year to use their reader instead of another free reader. Either way, the content is the same. For a little less than $180, I expect bells and whistles, which I guess I’m getting by continuing my Home Delivery subscription like a good dinosaur.