PressReader in the news

A pair of digital news companies are teaming up, with PressReader acquiring News360.

PressReader was founded back in 1999 as Newspaper Direct. It now operates a platform that converts newspapers and magazines into digital formats, while offering a $29.99 monthly subscription that provides unlimited access to more than 7,000 of those titles.

It’s been an interesting week here at PressReader. We’ve been running the world’s largest ‘Netflix for news’ for over a decade, so we watched Tim Cook’s Apple News+ announcement with great interest.

And I have to say, when it comes to an unlimited reading model for news and magazines, we have some differing thoughts on what the right business model looks like.

Some innovative hotels, airlines, and cruise operators are using premium content to deepen their connection with guests and enhance consumer experience. — PressReader

It may sound like a tongue-twister, but international expansion is no game to PressReader. Now into phase two of its international expansion plans, the company is serious about providing on-the-ground support to clients and local teams alike. Here, Nikolay Malyarov talks us through the Irish development.

In 2016, PressReader began working with Cathay Pacific’s marketing and passenger experience teams to provide a personalized reading experience for the three million passengers the airline serves each month.

During initial research, PressReader found that passengers chose to fly with Cathay Pacific because of its associated perks. As such, they decided to position the PressReader service as a premium offering, introducing differentiated access across the frequent flyer tiers and other passenger groups.

PressReader will be 20 years old this month. The company, which started out as NewspaperDirect printing newspaper content in situ on board cruise liners and in hotels, also has a massive digital legacy, experimenting with its first digital aggregation of newspaper and magazine titles as far back as 16 years ago. The company has been growing steadily and has been profitable since 2008, with monthly active users of the PressReader app climbing from 100,000 a couple years ago to more than 12 million this year.

Even with libraries closed temporarily, your local library card gives you access to much more than you may know — dozens of online resources from movies to electronic books and audiobooks, newspapers from across the world, and language instruction. And if you’re reading this and thinking, “I wish I had a library card,” you’re in luck. The libraries mentioned here, and others, offer E-cards; you can sign up for one on their websites. (Note that not all library systems offer all of these resources; check your local library’s website for details.) Here are some of local librarians’ favorite services.

Some say fake news helped swing the US election for Trump – or at the very least, is helping infantilize and weaponize ordinary Americans through incidents like Pizzagate. Meanwhile, Facebook is belatedly and begrudgingly realizing its own role in this mess as a publisher, with Mark Zuckerberg still in denial about the extent of the problem. Traditional de facto newsrooms are still shrinking, or getting abandoned altogether. For the big brand names in news that are still around, accusations of media bias are endemic – and the critics aren’t all wrong. Digital publishing and social media are often seen as a contributing factor to the downfall of the old self-appointed gatekeepers of truth. How can technology actually help media outlets save themselves?

Then there is PressReader, a sleeping giant in the digital media landscape headquartered in Canada. However, the real success of PressReader is providing access as part of sponsored deals with businesses such as Qantas Airlines, the New York Public Library and AccorHotels. The company is set to announce shortly that the luxury cruise company Uniworld will give access to all of PressReader’s publications for passengers, giving a newspaper-like experience and unfettered access to users on their own devices.

This is a win-win for the sponsors, giving users a unique and useful way to consume news, the publishers, who still generate revenue without devaluing their premium publications, and the users who can dig into publications from over 100 different countries.

PressReader delivers an authentic multi-platform newspaper-reading experience on PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets, and it lets you hold a digital edition of your favourite publication and read it from cover to cover, similar to its printed counterpart.

I found it especially useful for keeping up with international news, which often offers viewpoints you won’t find in US media, and also gave me an opportunity to see what’s happening in communities I’ve visited in the past or lived in years ago when I lived abroad.

Proto.io: What lands PressReader on our list of best designed apps goes back to their philosophy of providing access to information in a way that makes people actually want to consume it. For years now, people have been cutting back on magazine subscriptions, but that didn’t eliminate the desire to read some of the articles.

Thousands of publishers in China will distribute their content globally via the Sino-Canadian cooperation, which will be helpful in extending China’s global cultural presence while upgrading the development pattern of its digital newspapers and magazines and paving the way for internalization of its publishing market. Under the guidance of the “Chinese culture going out” strategy, the project aims to boost Internet plus and big data, and promote upgrading of Chinese publishing digitization in the global market.

Ultimately, anyone with even a passing interest in the news should give PressReader a try. If you’re a new user, you can download seven current-day issues of any paper free of charge. In other words, it’s a dream come true for news junkies.

In order to adapt to those trends, we have witness the dawn of several news media platforms, and PressReader is an excellent example of that – a platform that offers its readers access to newspapers from more than 120 countries around the world, in a very innovative way.

What I adore about PressReader is the fuss-free system it creates for reading. The UI is fast and intuitive, which is already miles better than the clunky iOS Newsstand app.

PressReader has been completely optimized for both the iPhone and the BlackBerry, allowing for easy navigation and content duplication on the small screen.