Democracy in digital age needs digital media: NYTimes goes #HTML5

Wow… big news that the New York Times is going HTML5.

The New York Times is a leader in trying to re-define the online news business and has had interesting success with various subscription and paywall offerings.

Hey, if you want great news, you gotta pay for it. The media isn’t a luxury in the digital age, it is and remains as always an important force for accountability and protecting democracy.

So it is great to see the NYTimes bringing its reporting and commentary to new web platforms, where it can been accessed regardless of device or OS.

Sure, the first step is for tablet, but one hopes that if this experiment is successful the HTML5 app will scale to other platforms.

In addition to the benefits for democracy, there is also a financial benefit to NYTimes:

The move is an interesting one, as it opens the way for the New York Times to sidestep Apple’s Newsstand fee of 30%, charged on subscriptions via the native iPad app.

NYTimes is following the FT as well as FirefoxOS partner the Boston Globe in using HTML5 to build native-like web apps.