Ongo, the Cupertino-based startup backed by the parent companies of The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, launched its ad-free, subscription-based news service to the public Tuesday morning.
The service offers users a clean, app-like interface in which to read and discuss news published on the web. A single front page displays the most important daily news from a variety of sources, along with stories surfaced by Ongo’s staff of human editors. Readers can explore further by publication, search and topics, a customized news “playlist” that can be arranged by title, section (such as technology or business) and keyword.
Unlike most aggregators, users can view full articles (in columned format, no less) without leaving the dashboard, offering a consistent, streamlined reading experience not unlike the reading experiences rendered by Flipboard and Pulse, two news reading apps for the iPad. Articles can be saved for later access at any time.
Subscriptions start at $6.99 per month and include complete access to The Guardian, Associated Press, The Washington Post (print edition), USA Today, Detroit Free Press, Miami Herald, Slate, and select content from the Financial Times and The New York Times. Subscribers can add one additional title from a list of newspapers and magazines at no extra cost; additional titles can be added starting at $0.99 per month.
Users can also feed RSS subscriptions into the dashboard; if it’s a full-text RSS feed (like Mashable‘s), users can also read the full articles without having to leave the Ongo dashboard.
In addition to the features cited above, Ongo’s creators have also introduced an interesting social feature in lieu of commenting, dubbed Clubs. Subscribers can create and join clubs to discuss certain articles or topics with fellow Ongo readers, and they can invite non-subscribers to access and discuss the same content.
Founding CEO and former PayPal executive Alex Kazim says Ongo wants to provide readers with a better conversation tool than commenting (“which eventually degrades into insults and then degrades the experience of reading the content,” he says) and sharing on Facebook (a group that can be too broad for many users, he believes). “We want [subscribers] to control who they are having the conversation with,” he explains.
There’s also an incentive for sharing: If a subscriber shares an article with a non-subscriber who then signs up for Ongo, the original subscriber will receive a free month of the service.
At launch, Ongo is offering a free 30-day trial to everyone who sets up a subscription. Users can also obtain a free “day pass” to access Ongo without having to furnish a credit card number. An app for the iPad is currently awaiting review by Apple; further applications for mobile and tablet devices are in the works, although in tests Ongo rendered cleanly in the iPad’s native browser.
While attaching a price tag to news that’s already available for free on the web is a tough proposition to begin with, it’s even more difficult given the relatively slim number of publications (mostly local and regional newspapers) the service is offering at launch. Such a service would, we think, appeal to avid news readers if Ongo did allow them to access all of the news they wanted in a single, ad-free dashboard, but at present most would-be subscribers will only be able to get a fraction of their daily content from Ongo, leaving them to wander the web for further information as they did previously.
Thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, ProfessorVasilich
More About: media, new york times, ongo
