Mornings like this one have always been a problem for newspapers. When the Iowa caucuses results — or other late news — breaks on or after the print deadline, most front pages feature an inconclusive story.
That’s an unavoidable consequence of having a daily production schedule. But it can and should be avoided on digital platforms, so days like today expose a significant flaw in the news apps that simply replicate the print edition.
Take The Washington Post as one example. Many people woke up this morning not yet knowing Mitt Romney was declared the eight-vote-margin winner of the caucuses overnight. Surely thousands grabbed an iPad and turned to the Post for results.
This is what they saw if they received the newspaper’s replica edition through a smart-PDF service like NewspaperDirect:
Fortunately, the Post has invested in its own app, designed specifically for the iPad experience, with live news updates. This is what it showed at the same time this morning:
To be fair, replica editions are improving. Just today, NewspaperDirect released version 3.0 of its PressReader app that delivers enhanced PDFs of more than 2,000 newspapers. It takes some design leaps with a new “SmartFlow” mode that reformats stories for easier reading. But it’s still the same bundle of news stories from the print edition, without updates or enhancements that a website would offer.
It’s clear why publishers like replica editions: They’re easy. The business model is familiar, the technology is outsourced and cheap or free, the editions are easy to produce by exporting print page PDFs, and they’re accessible on most any type of mobile device or PC.
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- The NYTimes for iPhone app gave readers a live, interactive map of Iowa Caucuses results Tuesday night.
But in the long-term, no one cares what’s easiest for the publisher. In a competitive digital news marketplace, we need to consider what’s best for the reader. And print replicas fudged into a digital screen are not.
Smart publishers will spend less time thinking about how to fit their newspaper into an app, and more time thinking about how to build a fresh app that stands as its own news product.
Consider, for example, how The New York Times was able to cover the caucuses last night through its mobile and tablet apps. Not only were there live-updating stories, but also an interactive map of county-level results. That kind of innovation — new features not imported from or even possible in the old medium — will win the future.
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