Nieman Journalism Lab
Megan Garber reports that News.me is going from a paid personalized iPad aggregation app to a free service, opting for “more scale than what a paid-content strategy could offer.”
“The app will still focus on creating a good reading experience; it will still focus on aggregating content from a wide variety of sources. And, speaking of, nothing’s really changing about News.me’s relationship with the publishers whose content it’s licensed.”
News.me’s relationship with publishers is what distinguished it, in large part, from similar services Trove, Ongo, Flipboard and Zite.
Here’s a brief timeline of News.me and the other big personalized aggregation news services:
| Sept. 13, 2011 | News.me goes free |
| Aug. 30, 2011 | CNN acquires Zite |
| Aug. 3, 2011 | AOL’s Editions launches |
| July 25, 2011 | Flipboard begins paid advertising with Condé Nast |
| May 23, 2011 | Four months later, how’s Ongo doing? |
| April 21, 2011 | News.me launches paid iPad aggregator |
| April 20, 2011 | Trove opens to the public (Washington Post is the owner) |
| March 31, 2011 | WP, AP, others send cease and desist letter to Zite |
| March 8, 2011 | Zite launches |
| Jan. 25, 2011 | Ongo launches (with investment from The Washington Post, The New York Times and Gannett) |
| Dec. 2, 2010 | Flipboard launches Pages for Publishers |
| Sept. 9, 2010 | News.me launch announced for late 2010 (New York Times is an investor) |
| July 21, 2010 | Flipboard launches |
Jeff Sonderman contributed to this timeline.
