Apple Inc. has reportedly signed up the Wall Street Journal to its upcoming subscription news service, which is likely to be announced next week.

The New York Times, which said it won’t be joining Apple’s service, reported that Apple and the Journal will announce their partnership at a media event scheduled to take place on March 25.

It’s said that Apple’s new news service will provide subscribers with access to articles from “hundreds” of publishers for a monthly fee of $9.99.

Apple hasn’t said anything about which publishers have signed onto the service so far, but previous reports have suggested the iPhone maker has struggled to attract interest from some of the most prominent media organizations. In addition to the Times, the Washington Post has also rejected the chance to collaborate with Apple.

That’s because Apple is supposedly playing hardball when it comes to splitting revenue. The Cupertino-based firm has apparently insisted that it will keep 50 percent of all the profits from its subscriptions, with the other half going to the publishers.

The company has also refused to hand over important data such as the credit card details and email addresses of subscribers to the publishers. That’s a sore point, because media companies can use this information to create customer profiles and better market their products.

Yet another concern for some publishers is that Apple’s service could upend their own subscription sales. The Times and the Post both sell paid content and do not need to share that revenue with anyone, but they fear that some readers might simply drop those subscriptions in favor of Apple’s service if they were to get onboard.

Still, Apple has justified its stance by saying the sheer scale of Apple News will more than compensate. The app is installed on every single iOS device out of the box, so publishers could potentially reach millions of new readers with its premium content offering. That message has apparently resonated with hundreds of magazine publishers, at least, since many of those do not have an existing online revenue stream.

Whether or not Apple users are actually willing to pay for premium new content is the biggest question mark, however. Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Apple could struggle to monetize its news services in what is an already crowded, shrinking and cut-throat market.

“With plenty of advertisement-funded news aggregation services out there, coupled with Apple’s lack of in house cloud infrastructure to power machine learning for superior content delivery, this will be a tall order for Apple,” Mueller said.

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