I will say that iOS 7 does seem to have made the NYTimes Newstand app actually work properly. Like it says there is new content, and I open it, and the new content is actually there already. Which is the whole premise of Newstand. On iOS 6, it would display an update spinner every time.

Edit: From reading the article, it seems like this is probably because NYTimes is updated more than once per day, but Newsstand only allows one update per day. So the Newsstand update mechanism was never very useful for this case.