Recovering Journalist
Reviewing the iPad apps offered by print publications Mark Potts suggests their readers are better off using the Web instead. On his Recovering Journalist blog Potts lambastes almost every major media app currently offered for “trying to replicate a print experience on the iPad’s screen.” He saves his harshest criticism for The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
“The Journal, for instance, thinks it can charge $17 a month for access to its app. … Are they kidding? I wouldn’t use this piece of crap for free (I’m a big Journal fan, but I couldn’t delete it from my iPad fast enough). It’s hard to navigate, it’s only updated once a day, it’s full of bugs and it offers little in the way of interactivity. … The Times app is a painfully cutdown version of the paper, with truncated stories, missing sections and hopelessly retro newspaper-like navigation. Fail. It’s not the Times’ design that’s great about the Times: It’s the journalism. Why sacrifice that to pretty fonts and layout?”
