“Are We at a Party, or a Wake?”: Journalists Wonder If Apple News+ Is a Trojan Horse | Vanity Fair

From another News+ reality check; coincidentally, see Zuckerberg lays out his vision for a 'high-quality' news tab in Facebook, but he hasn't started working on it yet | CNBC

"That more or less sums up the schizophrenic reactions to the launch of Apple News+, which is the latest—and arguably the most consequential—entrant in a series of newfangled platform-publisher experiments ranging from Facebook Instant Articles, to Snapchat Discover, to Google Amp. On the one hand, publications throughout the industry have either moved, or are moving, toward revenue models in which people pay them directly for what they’re reading online. Apple's new venture can give publications like these the opportunity to reach millions of Apple consumers who might not already be subscribing to their content, as long as these publications are willing to give Apple a reported 50 percent of the total News+ subscription pie. (The other half is being split amongst the publishers based on engagement levels.) This proposition may sound especially promising to publications that don’t already have large, loyal audiences paying to read them on the Web each month. As one media executive put it to me, “If you have a subscription business or a membership business, and you’ve got, like, 9,000 digital subscribers, you don’t have much to lose going in with Apple.”"

“Are We at a Party, or a Wake?”: Journalists Wonder If Apple News+ Is a Trojan Horse | Vanity Fair