by: Stuart Dredge | Guardian.co.uk

News publishers – this one included – are excited about the potential of smartphone and tablet apps as a new way to make money from subscriptions.

But at the same time, they're gauging the impact and potential of news aggregation apps: Flipboard, Zite, News360, Pulse, Taptu, Flud and numerous others. What if the app-future for news is more about advertising partnerships with these companies than paying punters for the publishers' own apps?