We’ve looked at a lot of digital versions of their newspaper counterparts. Today instead we’re looking at news sources providing their content only online and not through any print formats.  I’m examining digital-only news sources The Daily, Newsy and New360.

 

THE DAILY

I was very excited for The Daily when it was announced. The first iPad-only news source, backed by Rupert Murdoch, the first Apple-endorsed app to use the new App Store subscription model – it seemed like this was going to change the way that people viewed digital news and open the door for paid subscriptions to news and magazine apps which at the time were struggling to find consumers willing to purchase digital subscriptions. And they needed paying subscribers (500,000 to be more precise): they have a large team and their own reporters/journalists so the content is original.

But the app was very heavy. The early versions crashed frequently and took a long time to download each day’s edition. There were bugs. It was slow. It crashed when it tried to detect my location (since I am outside the US). Every few days, the app would forget that I had a paid subscription & require me to sign up again, causing me to fear I was being charged multiple times. Eventually that annoyance and the focus on US news (there is still very little world news coverage except for very big stories) caused me to cancel my subscription.

At SND last week, I learned that The Daily has a team of 50 designers to help lay out each day’s issue by hand, 100 pages in total. And then they do it again in landscape mode. They have no automatic templates. They use Adobe tools the whole way through up until they need to put it into the CMS and then rebuild it there. To me, this whole process sounds like a nightmare. An unsustainable one at that.

But the pro of this painful process is that The Daily has absolute freedom to design however they want, something most publishers can’t do from either a financial or labour perspective. They can use things like Jamie Beck’s cinemagraphs. They can hand-code HTML5 animations and transitions when they run into CMS limitations. They have freedom to design and customize everything each day. That’s pretty amazing, and something I think a lot of publishers would appreciate, especially given that at every event I’ve been to this year, CMSs have been cited as painful and limiting software.

With their creativity and design freedom, The Daily designers have experimented with many interesting ideas. They have a carousel of image pages to use for navigation, or you can use the navigation links at the bottom. They now do a brief video report for each edition describing the day’s stories. They have cool interactive features in certain articles allowing the user to play or respond to a survey or guess trivia. There’s a scroll bar at the top to move quickly around the issue and see thumbnails of stories.

The Daily reported last week that they have 80,000 paying subscribers. Although it’s not even 20% of what they will need to eventually break even, it’s still an impressive number, especially given that they launched only back in February. Perhaps they will streamline design to save money or perhaps the increase in iPad sales will spur further growth for them. For me, it’s an impressive design but not content I’m interested in. Plus it still crashes a lot for me.

Someone at SND (I think Josh Clark?) that there could be room for a model where people select and pay for the news they want. If this were the case, I might opt to pay for the arts, tech and news sections. At least let me save the room on my iPad memory? After all, why force users to wait for the celebrity gossip section and sports section to download when they never intend to read those? It could be an interesting model to consider.

 

NEWSY

The novel idea about Newsy is that it is video-only news. I couldn’t verify with certainty that it is the first video-only news site or app, but it’s the first one I have heard about. Newsy is multi-source and multi-platform, and it claims it is the only video news service that allows users to compare bias by highlighting nuances in reporting.

Newsy currently works on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. Plus their website has all of their content as well.

How does Newsy work? Newsy takes various reports on the same subject, from sources like MSNBC, ABC, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, etc., and produces short, professional video clips highlighting common and disparate views from the various channels. They provide additional context and conveniently merged video clips. Sources for each story are noted at the top of each video page.

Stories featured on Newsy come from their rotating editorial team, who research blogs, news sites, magazines, television and many other sources. They have their own technology which can record as they do their research to help them put together the whole story when they feel they have a comprehensive, bias-free view.  Viewers are invited to comment on stories and contribute as well.

Newsy is a refreshing look at world, US, political, business, tech, entertainment, science and sports news without a bias or an agenda. There are ads on their apps and website, but other than that I’m not sure what their revenue model is. They have been winning awards and getting great reviews, so I’m sure we’ll continue to see them do interesting things.

 

NEWS360

If The Daily is the first iPad-only news and Newsy is the first video-only news, News360 has to be the first semantic analysis news. While it sounds similar, it is actually quite different to something like Zite or News.me. It’s hard to explain without using it.

News360 takes information from your social profiles, generates what it thinks are your interests (although you have a lot of granular control over this & can edit it further), and then provides you with a giant feed of stories it thinks are interesting for you. The difference between this and something like Zite is that it collects various sources for the same story and lets you read the version you want (or all of them).

  

For example, if I am reading about Steve Yegge’s Google+ post, I get options to read the version from the International Business Times, The Register, Forbes.com, Wired News and 38 additional sources for this story. Whew! Also interesting is that I get the abbreviated text in a nice, easy-to-read format, but I can see the original as well by pulling up the source page below. I also get buttons for sharing the article on any of seven social networks as well as highlighting the common text for this article.

There’s some weirdness in News360. Why do I need a URL to access my stories? Why does it need permission to post to my Twitter feed? Does it actually get value from analysing my Evernote account? Does this process really “save hours of my life?”

   

But despite the long set-up time and confusing options, New360 provides a lot of news sources and a lot of articles relevant to a user’s interests. If you’re a news nut and find yourself visiting lots of sites over the course of a day and re-reading the same articles, this app may help you focus on the unique stories and then read the version that suits you (or all of them, if you need more info), ignoring a lot of duplication.

 

SUMMARY

The doom and gloom we keep hearing from the print media industry is definitely depressing. I recently went to see Page One: Inside the New York Times and found the idea that people might stop paying for investigative journalism very scary. At the same time it is wonderful to see creative minds building apps like these to try to find new models of generating revenue for news and information.  I also love that there is a focus on getting the story from several angles so as to remove bias and get the most correct version. I realize this cannot happen without either exclusive contracts or lack of pay wall, however, so that is a challenge. It will definitely be interesting to see these apps continue to grow.