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Big Newpaper Publishers Launch Ongo News Site

  • Reuters, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:08 AM

A personalized news service funded by New York Times Co., Washington Post Co, and Gannett just launched in an attempt to get readers to pay for online news. Ongo, which received $12 million in funding ($4 million each) from the three newspaper publishers, delivers news from a variety of sources starting at $7 a month, reports Reuters. 

The basic subscription plan includes articles from the Associated Press, The Washington Post, USA Today and select stories from The New York Times, Financial Times. Users can add titles, such as the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press, for 99 cents a month for each additional source. Ongo's layout hews closely to print with stories presented in several columns, although it is accessed through Web browsers, smartphones and tablets.

The website is advertising-free to provide a less-cluttered reading experience, reports AP. Ongo described itself in a press release as a "personal news service that gives consumers a fundamentally new way to read, discover and share digital news and information."

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1 comment about "Big Newpaper Publishers Launch Ongo News Site".
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  1. Jonathan Mirow from BroadbandVideo, Inc., January 26, 2011 at 3:03 p.m.

    Head out of ass department: "personal news service that gives consumers a fundamentally new way to read, discover and share digital news and information." - these guys should really get out more. There's an app that CAME on my droid that searches for contextual news all over the web and delivers it to my phone. There are no ads except the ones that already exist on the news pages. It's free, not $7 a month or 99 cents a week or whatever they're trying to charge. When (and it's rare) that I hit a paywall or "sign up" page, I click on to the next story - which is what 99% of people on the web do when faced with these kinds of charges. Are they REALLY this clueless? Ongo waste a buncha money on something nobody's gonna use. The epic fail that is the demise of the newspaper industry in America continues...

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