Apple News Plus: Get started with Apple’s new magazine subscription service – CNET

Apple announced a premium newspaper and magazine subscription service on Monday, called Apple News Plus. It’s available today with an update to iOS and MacOS Mojave for $9.99 a month.

That subscription price gets you get unlimited access to nearly 300 magazines and newspapers — including Time, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Wired, Skimm, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal — all inside the News app.

There’s a free one-month trial before you have to start paying the $10 monthly fee. The good news is that everyone in your family has full access to Apple News Plus, and can have their own favorites and personalized recommendations.

In addition to the US, News Plus is available in Canada, offering more than 30 Canadian English- and French-language magazines and The Toronto Star newspaper. The premium service will roll out to Australia and Europe later this year, Apple said. ($9.99 converts to about £7.50 or AU$14.)

I downloaded the new service, and it’s easy to set up. It’s also easy to locate what you are looking for, either by browsing the catalog or by scrolling through topic-specific tabs — that span business to gardening — at the top of the app.

Here’s how you get started. Scroll to the end for more on how the service works.

How to install Apple News Plus

Apple’s News Plus is available today as part of the iOS 12.2 update. Here’s how to set up a premium subscription to News Plus.

1. To get it on your iPhone ($1,000 at Amazon) and iPad ($250 at Amazon), head to Settings and then Software Update and tap Download and Install. The update is big and, depending on your connection speed, may take a while. It did for us.
2. On your Home screen, tap the News icon.
3. If you’ve not set up News yet, tap through the setup screens, including whether to allow News to access your location to customize your newsfeed.
4. Tap the News Plus button at the bottom of the News window.
5. News Plus offers a 30-day trial to check out the service, so tap the red Get Started button to get going.
6. Tap the red Try It Free button on the next window.
7. The app may ask you to sign in using your Apple ID. If you need to sign in, tap Settings and enter your Apple ID and password. Then head back to the News app.
8. Tap the blue Confirm button that you want to start your 1 month trial subscription.
9. Enter your Apple ID if prompted to sign in and start your trial.

How to start reading magazines in Apple News Plus

A News Plus subscription gets you unlimited access to all the magazines and newspapers in the plan. You can browse the catalog to view the entire collection and then tap a magazine cover to view its table of contents, if the magazine has one — not all of them do.

Publishers can also create an animated magazine cover, giving it an appealing Live-Photos-like look. I love how the animated cover looks but only saw one, from National Geographic, as I was browsing the collection.

To direct you to content that may interest you, Apple’s news editors curate article and topic collections, so you can check out hand-picked feature stories or interesting travel articles, for example. You don’t have to feel self-conscious about your reading choices: Apple made a point of stating that neither it nor its advertisers will be able to track what you are reading.

Browse the catalog and read a magazine

To get going in the app, tap the Browse the Catalog tab to view all current publications. Magazines are sorted alphabetically, starting with ABC Soaps in Depth.

Tap a magazine cover to start reading. For magazines without a table of contents, flip through the pages by tapping the Next arrow in the bottom-right corner of the page.

For those with a table of contents, scroll down from the cover to view the table of contents and then navigate to a story by tapping it.

The main window also displays the current magazine you are reading in the My Magazines area. The most recent magazine you opened appears here, but I didn’t see an obvious way to queue more than one magazine here.

If you want to read the magazine while offline, tap the little download button below the cover to save the magazine to your phone.

With a magazine open, you can tap the Share button in the top-right corner to share the magazine with another News Plus subscriber. You can also jump back to the start of the magazine by tapping the thumbnail of the magazine in the bottom-left corner. Tap the back arrow in the top-left corner to return back to the main page.

Find a magazine by topic

Along the top, you can scroll through the tabs along the top to locate a topic you’re interested in. Arranged alphabetically, the tabs run from Business & Finance to Women’s Lifestyle. Tap a tab to see the collection of magazines Apple has gathered into the collection.

Jump to curated content

From the main page, scroll down to see magazines and articles Apple is highlighting. Selections I saw while browsing include a Rolling Stone article on Game of Thrones, tips on travel and a selection of business, entertainment and science news.

Why I like Apple News Plus

The $10 all-you-can-read monthly price is certainly appealing if, like me, you subscribe to more than one publication. I pay for the digital versions of several newspapers, get a physical paper delivered daily, and subscribe to three or four more weekly magazines. It adds up: Monthly access to The Washington Post is $3.99 with an Amazon Prime account. A basic digital subscription to The New York Times runs $15 a month, and access to the digital edition of The New Yorker is $8.33 a month, for example. And it’s not just about saving money. With readership declining across publishing, Apple’s push into the magazine subscription business might bring in more readers — and with them more dollars.