Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
“The news feeds do not sag”: A look at Ukraine’s local news landscape, more than a year into the war
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
April 19, 2016, 10:05 a.m.
LINK: www.theskimm.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen   |   April 19, 2016

“Never again will you wonder when Beyoncé tickets go on sale, what time the State of the Union is on, or when your favorite show is back on Netflix”: The extremely popular daily email newsletter The Skimm, which has more than 3.5 million subscribers (that’s an increase of about 2 million since we wrote about the company eight months ago) on Tuesday launched Skimm Ahead, an iPhone app that integrates with the phone’s calendar to keep users posted on national events from entertainment (concerts, Netflix premieres, book releases) to politics to sports.

“If the daily Skimm is about what already happened, this is about what will happen,” Skimm cofounder Carly Zakin told The Wall Street Journal.

The app will cost $2.99 a month after one free month (“That’s less than what you pay at Starbucks a day”). From the Journal:

theSkimm has tapped 12,000 of its most active and social media-oriented readers — they call them Skimmbassadors — and tasked them with promoting the new subscription product, which will not carry any advertising. TheSkimm is not paying these Skimmbassadors for this promotion, but it is offering them some hands-on training in public relations. One Skimmbassador will get a shot at interviewing for a job at the 18-person company.

Users can also read the daily (free) newsletter from within the app and get a push notification about it in the morning.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
“The news feeds do not sag”: A look at Ukraine’s local news landscape, more than a year into the war
Most of the publishers surveyed now view “external migrants” — Ukrainians who’ve left the country — as their target audience.
Uncovering Karachi: How journalists use maps and data to investigate problems in a modern metropolis
“The absence of data, either it paralyzes you or you become more curious.”
How a titan of 20th-century journalism transformed the AP — and the news
“If one man fails to file a story of a millionairess marrying a poor factory hand because that man understands such a story is not properly A.P. stuff, such an error of news judgment ought to be generally made known to other employees.”