The New York Times' Election 2012 iPhone app (Courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab)

 

In its latest power move in new media, the New York Times has unveiled its’ Election 2012 iPhone app. According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, one of the most notable design elements are story clusters that along with a Times story, provides related content from other stories around the web.

It’s the Times second big grab to capture the new media market; earlier this year, they created a New York Times app for the iPad. (Apple and the Times have an affinity towards each other, seemingly)

According to the article form Nieman, the content is hand-picked by an editor, not using an aggregator like Blogrunner (In the words of the Blogrunner site, “Blogrunner is a news aggregator from The New York Times that monitors articles and blog posts and tracks news stories as they develop across the Web”).

I believe that the Times is playing to a niche market. However, they would also be playing to an affluent market, as the iPad  is still relatively expensive (I sure don’t have $499 off hand), however, I’m sure that sounds quite lovely to advertisers.

However, the Nieman article makes another interesting point. “Maybe more importantly, the app’s full content is only available to digital or print subscribers… For existing subscribers, this’ll serve as a nice surprise, a bonus to send home the value of a sub; for non-subscribers, it’s another little incentive, another reason to pony up.”