Cage Match at the Newsstand
Media Apps for Android Tabs, Part III
Here’s a question for you—when you view the contents of a newspaper on your Android tablet, are you reading the paper or using a tablet? If you feel like the question is academic, you’re probably not in the publishing business. Publishers are wrestling with this existential stuff around the clock, for reasons that are, well, central to their existence.
In a research study conducted recently by Bonnier Corporation, publishers of Popular Science, Field & Stream, and Parenting, among other magazines, researchers found that magazine apps often act as “springboards,” sending readers off in pursuit of items that catch their attention. People who read magazines on tablets are “actually bouncing around a lot more than we thought,” according to Megan Miller, Bonnier’s research and development program director. “Within seconds they’re researching the products that they could buy. If they see a snowboard in a snowboarding magazine, they’ll bounce over to Amazon to check the prices on it.”
The study uncovered another interesting and related point. Most people in the study didn’t describe what they were doing as reading a magazine. Instead, they said they were using a tablet. OK… hold that thought.
The News Today, Oh Boy.
In recent posts we’ve looked at different ways to acquire and read books on Android tablets. In this post, we turn our attention to newspapers and magazines. This portion of the print world is called ephemera, because generally speaking, when people buy newspapers and magazines they read them quickly and throw them away.
In the newspaper business one consequence of ephemerality is that most non-local content has become a commodity. A quick glance at any of America’s 1,500 or so daily newspapers shows that the national and international stories seldom originate with that paper’s reporters. Instead, reporting is syndicated from bureaus like Reuters and AP, or from big papers with national audiences like the New York Times or the Washington Post. In other words, the preponderance of original reporting in most of the country’s dailies is regional or local. It makes sense. Why hire reporters when you can share someone else’s?
All the News That Fits
People who want to read their hometown dailies on an Android tablet are likely to be disappointed, at least for the time being, since most American daily newspapers haven’t gotten around to providing content via Android apps, This may change as the installed base grows, and it may not be a bad thing anyway, as we’ll see in a minute. In the meantime, the happy few newspapers who do offer apps in Android Market include the Baltimore Sun… the Chicago Tribune… the New York Times… the Los Angeles Times… Northern Virginia Daily… the (Oklahoma City) Oklahoman… the Philadelphia Inquirer… the Portland (ME) Press Herald… the St. Louis Post Dispatch… the Seattle Times… USA Today… the Wall Street Journal… and the Washington Post. If you live in one of those places, congratulations.
We’ve been using the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times apps for several weeks now. Both offer a cleanly-formatted daily scroll of headlines which bring up the story when tapped. The New York Times app is especially comfortable to use … it’s very thoughtfully organized. Unfortunately, newspaper publishers have somehow gotten the notion that readers ought to pay for what they read, and even as we’re writing this, the Times is building a paywall, bringing this very good thing to an end, at least for us, because we intend to stay on the free side of the wall.
There are two reasons why we don’t see the point of paying for newspaper apps, no matter how good. First, the experience of reading a newspaper on a digital tablet doesn’t come close to the experience of reading a printed newspaper, and isn’t worth a similar price. This isn’t Luddite nostalgia—it really is harder to get the same amount of information from a newspaper app than from a printed newspaper. In print the stories are selected and presented, and you have to make a conscious decision to skip over them. On a screen you make the opposite decision: you choose stories from the headline scroll, wait for the story to load, and then go about the business of reading it… if you still want to.
But a better reason not to pay for newspaper apps is that news of all types is available to tablet users in a free and more convenient format—news readers that draw from RSS and Atom feeds, such as Pulse or Google Reader. News readers have huge advantages over newspaper apps. For one thing, they can access a variety of sources, which means they can be much more comprehensive than any single newspaper. For another, you can connect to information sources outside the world of newspapers, such as broadcast Web sites and people’s blogs. You can tailor the feeds to your personal hobbies, passions, and interests as well as to current events. And finally, news readers allow you to get the same news stories from differing points of view, which is contrary to the way a newspaper presents information—one paper seldom quotes another.
Here’s how we see it: national and international news doesn’t originate at most dailies, local or regional news can be obtained from sources other than newspapers, and your hobbies and other personal interests probably aren’t going to be addressed in a newspaper anyway. A news reader will provide you with much more information than any newspaper app we’ve seen… hands down.
As for which news reader to use, Google Reader has a sort of home team appeal for Android users, but Pulse is said to be more popular with mobile users as a whole. Both apps are free, and from a functional perspective we haven’t found one much better than the other. That said, the clever Pulse layout has more visual interest, and for that reason is probably more engaging. We’re not speaking from experience, but we’re told that the following apps add a more appealing front end to the Google Reader engine:
-gReader (free and $5.56 “Pro” versions)
-FastReader (free)
-FeedSquares (free)
-NewsRob (free and $5.56 “Pro” versions)
There are many other news readers in addition to these, and we should probably add that Pulse integrates very conveniently with Google Reader, so you can have your cake and eat it too.
Filed under: GentryMedia •Apps4Tablets •
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