Steve Jobs' Big New York Times Letdown
Users have jeered the New York Times' main iPad app, but the newspaper is listening to one in particular: We hear Steve Jobs is among the app's most vociferous critics and has been shunning it. — Jobs clearly wanted to make access to the electronic Times …
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times shipped one of the iPad's marquee launch apps in April 2010, but reception has been rough — users have jeered its quality, and Gawker now reports, unconfirmed, that Steve Jobs himself counts among the app's most vocal critics and has stopped using it. That lands on top of an unresolved internal fight at the paper over who controls the iPad product, documented in February's turf war over the Times' iPad app.
The stakes are structural rather than cosmetic: back in January, the Times itself argued the iPad needs media deals to deliver on its promise, making the paper both Apple's showcase content partner and a dependent one. Jobs' personal attention to third-party apps has been visible all spring — from his admission of error over the rejected Pulitzer-winner app in April ([[a:1187511]]) to his public email sparring over Flash — so a founder-level thumbs-down on the flagship news app carries weight beyond one bad review.
First-order effects
- If the report holds, the Times faces direct pressure from its most important distribution partner to fix or rebuild its main iPad app, on top of public user complaints about quality.
- Jobs' reported shunning of the app undercuts the launch-partner halo the Times bought by shipping day-one, weakening the app's value as proof the iPad can replace the printed paper.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers watching the Apple relationship learn that even marquee launch partners get no protection from Apple's taste judgments — raising the bar for every newspaper and magazine app racing to the device.
- Inside the Times, the criticism strengthens whichever faction argued the iPad product needed dedicated ownership rather than a repurposed web effort, forcing a resolution of the February turf war.
Third-order effects
- The episode points toward platform gatekeeping as the defining condition of tablet-era publishing: Apple's approval and attention become de facto editorial filters that shape how news organizations design their products, with access-layer control concentrated in Cupertino rather than in newsrooms.
- If founders-turned-reviewers set the standard for what ships well on tablets, publishers will increasingly compete on native-app craft rather than ported print layouts — reshaping newsroom product budgets around Apple's expectations.
The trend: Tablet-era news distribution is consolidating around Apple's gatekeeping judgment, where a platform owner's personal standards can make or break a publisher's flagship product.