'NYT' Engine Helps Other Newspapers Create Apps

NYT ipad app

The New York Times is leading the newspaper industry into the future with a new digital publishing platform, Press Engine. The service, drawing on the NYT's experience creating its own apps for the iPhone and iPad, is scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter of this year. It is available to other newspaper publishers for a fee.

  Michael Greenspon, general manager of The New York Times News Services, explained: "We are providing our expertise in news reader applications to allow publishers of all sizes to offer their readers elegant applications for iPhone and iPad devices."

The new service will provide app templates that save articles, share content, have photo galleries, audio and video features, horizontal and vertical reading, simple search, and device-standard advertising units. It also allows for partial offline reading.

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According to the NYT, Press Engine has already attracted quite a few clients, including The Dallas Morning News, The Press-Enterprise of Southern California, The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, and the U.K.'s Telegraph Media Group. Internally, Press Engine will create mobile apps for the International Herald Tribune, The Gainesville Sun and The Lakeland Ledger in Florida, all of which are published by the New York Times Co.

The NYT announcement comes as newspaper publishers rush to create apps for a new generation of mobile devices, including smartphones like the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android, and e-readers like Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle.

Last month, the NYT said iPhone owners had downloaded a total of 4.5 million NYT apps over the last year, making it one of the most popular newspaper apps for the device.

In addition, 400,000 copies of its iPad app have been downloaded since the new Apple tablet computer debuted in April, reaching 12% of iPad buyers. (About 3.3 million iPads have been sold through July.)

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