Last week The New York Times gave me an offer I couldn't refuse: 12 weeks of digital access for $5. No, that's not $5 per week. That's $5 for the entire 12-week period. See why I couldn't refuse? I'd been reading the Times' Top News on Flipboard for months, and I knew I liked it in that format. Now that I have access to the entire paper for a few months, I decided to try out the native Android and iOS apps and see which I liked better. Note that I purchased Tablet access, so I didn't test this out on my...

For years now, whenever reports from Mexico have popped up in American news outlets, the stories have almost always revolved around the seemingly endless homicides that are taking place in the northern reaches of the country, where many of Mexico's infamous drug cartels are based. But an op-ed about one aspect of the Mexican cultural landscape that appeared in the New York Times recently has been earning attention for a very different, if still inexcusable, state of affairs: Much of the country, it seems, has effectively stopped reading. As the article's author, David Toscana, explains... The proportion of the Mexican population that is...

Flipboard made my list of great productivity apps in a previous post I wrote for GadgeTell (one of TeleRead's sister sites), but until today I only used it on my iPad. Why? Because the New York Times was only available in the iOS version. Not only that, but previously, if you logged into Flipboard on Android, you lost Times access on your iOS device. No longer! As of today, you can get the Times in the Android and Kindle Fire versions as well. I just downloaded it and tested it out. The articles look great on my Nexus 7. Flipping is smooth. In fact, I think I like it better on Android. The Times in the iOS...

I about wet myself after opening up the February 18 issue of New York magazine, after which I immediately flipped to the often imitated (but never duplicated) Approval Matrix. There it was, right down in the furthest corner of the Brilliant/Lowbrow axis: Liberal-arts rockers Vampire Weekend show their allegiance to print by announcing their new album title in the N.Y. Times classifieds. Don't get me wrong: I realize we're all media-savvy enough to recognize this sort of thing as a clever marketing ploy, and nothing more. But therein lies the basis of my excitement ... and the overarching point of this post. Let me...

Did anyone else notice the fantastic Kindle Paperwhite infographic that ran in the New York Times' Business section on December 26? It appears to have been a dual effort on the part of tech reporter Brian X. Chen and graphics editor Frank O'Connell; the latter put together an equally gorgeous infographic about the Lytro camera back in February. We've reproduced a portion of the graphic for you below, but in order to access the "info" aspect of the feature, you'll need to click here to visit the Times' site. The piece essentially explains how the Paperwhite's "unique lighting system" works: "Rather than using a...

Editor's note: Rob Walker is the sort of writer whose name you may not be familiar with, but whose work you've almost certainly encountered—at least once or twice, if not dozens of times. Walker is also an incredibly prolific creator of content, but he's probably best known as the author of "Consumed," a legendarily quirky New York Times Magazine column about marketing and the culture of American consumption.  Earlier this year, Walker compiled a selection of "Consumer" columns into e-book form as something of an experiment. In the following post, which originally appeared on Observatory, the blog of the Design Observer Group, Walker takes...

The National Book Foundation has just announced the two recipients of its 2012 Lifetime Achievement Awards, and the winners certainly make for a curious (yet very deserving) pair: The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) is being awarded to the 86-year-old novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard, while the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community goes to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the current publisher of the New York Times. Both men will be honored on November 14 at the annual National Book Awards event, which is scheduled to take place this year at Cipriani Wall Street (which, by the way, was formerly home to...

From the Great Ideas Department of the Nieman Journalism Lab's website today comes a semi-sarcastic yet truly brilliant advice-essay from Rex Sorgatz, who has just succeeded in handing the New York Times their next million dollar idea ... for free! (Nice guy, huh?) I'll skip the paraphrasing and let those of you who are interested in such things read Sorgatz's piece yourselves. But the gist of it is this: He's proposing that as part of the Times' ongoing effort to stave off bankruptcy, they create an exclusive and trendy membership club that comes with discounted access to various Times-produced content and events. (Sorgatz even went so...

The New York Times today announced it is embarking on a program which will make its content available through various third-party services, starting with iOS (and, since last week, Android) social media aggregator Flipboard. The program will make all NYT content available to subscribers via login validation, while a selection of articles will be available free to everybody. New York Times webmaster Denise Warren said that the paper had embarked on the program after realizing 20% of its subscribers use third-party software like Flipboard to read content, and saw it as an opportunity to enable additional functionality for paying...

Here’s an amusing little blog post from the New York Times about reading and guilty pleasures. It seems to be saying that people feel guilty about reading modern (allegedly inferior) stuff they like instead of reading all those old hard-to-plow-through “classics” that (they feel) aren’t much fun to read. The article is kind of amusing because the way it starts, by questioning whether one genre can or should be considered inferior to another, you assume it’s going to say that modern stuff isn’t necessarily any worse than older stuff—then it takes a screeching 180-degree turn when it suggests that,...

Nick Bilton has a piece in the New York Times in which he tells of how he wandered into an old bookshop in New York and stared (and smelled) nostalgically at the printed pages all around. As an avowed e-reader now, he nonetheless misses the experience of shopping in bookstores. For those of us who have switched to e-readers , the e-book shopping experience, while immediate and painless, is about as sentimental as a trip to the family doctor. There are no creaking doors, or bells that announce your arrival so someone can smile at you as you walk inside. There...

We’ve written about device restrictions on airplanes before, but in the New York Times Nick Bilton presents an angle that hasn’t been as widely considered: what happens when people’s electronic devices aren’t so obvious? A PDA or smartphone is one thing, but what about a smart watch or even smart glasses that have their own computerized networking enabled? “We’re not policemen. We’re not going to be able to get anything done if we have to ask people if they’re wearing sunglasses or computer glasses and if their watch is a computer,” [transport worker union president Stacy...