The New Yorker launched an iPhone app today that enhances the magazine’s Goings On About Town (GOAT) listings with digital doodads like maps, GPS, links to buy tickets and contact venues, the option to filter by date, filter by location filters, and clip-and-save favorites, editor Ben Greenman announced today.
It also includes original text and audio from marquis New Yorker names like Alex Ross, Susan Orlean, Roz Chast, Peter Schjeldahl, Paul Goldberger, Calvin Trillin and Patricia Marx. The announcement suggests the New Yorker has found a way to offer a digital point of entry to the magazine without diluting the brand or sacrificing their subscription revenue.
It is exclusively sponsored by Mastercard, which presumably you can also use to pay for many of the GOATs. The app is a landmark development, some say.
In fact, words can’t describe the achievement quite like the app trailer The New Yorker has produced. Watch, and you’ll see scenes of New York culture–the lights on Broadway, a bustling restaurant, a sun-drenched museum hall-accompanied by piano chords. With the title card “NOW ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE,” the electric guitar comes in, for a crescendo and climax which we can only imagine approximates what it felt like to hear Chuck Berry perform live.
In spite of the New Yorker‘s robust listings section, we never really associated it with New York service content, or even New York the city, really. It always seemed like a national publication and a Chesnutt Hill-Brookline-Winnetka fetish. But even if it isn’t useful for every New Yorker reader, it’s free and its icon on one’s iPhone will serve the same function as unread issues fanned out on one’s coffee table–instant sophistication!
