The Future of News Looks Like This

Today we launched the new USAToday.com.
Thank’s to the magnificent and tireless work of an army of engineers, designers, programmers, product managers, editors, etc., under the direction of Gannett Digital president David Payne, we are taking a huge step into the future, not without risk, by creating what we believe is a major step for our viewers and advertisers.
The new USAToday.com is a dramatic change for both.

For our readers and viewers it represents a significant step toward visual storytelling, but one that respects the fact that no two readers are alike, especially during times of significant technological change. We give you several options on how to view news, information, entertainment and advertising but all involve significant curation by our editorial staff, the heart and soul of the value we bring to this storytelling process. This creation is truly a collaborative work between dedicated technologists and equally dedicated journalists.

We give the reader the ability to use visuals or words in varying degrees in their consumption process. And we will do it in varying degrees. If the reader wants, for example, he or she can view each story by starting with a photograph or a video. They can even use a device we call “Cover Mode” (see the little book-like design at the top of the page) that allows them to see each story via a full-page photograph, the most dramatic use of still photography in the storytelling process we have ever seen on the Internet.

We give you the ability to view by our definition of importance or by anyone’s definition of timeliness. By merely scrolling over a visual reference to a story they can also see more text to put that story in context. And by viewing our “Right Now” column along the right side of the page, you will see relevant social media reactions to the ongoing story in real-time.
Our horizontal navigation, inspired by the growing and already massive use of tablets, allows the reader to “peruse” the sections or the stories on the site by turning pages, re-imagining the “discovery” process we so love in the print media. It allows you to be surprised by content you didn’t know existed, but to do so at your own speed, depending upon your time and inclination.

Cover View: A new way to peruse stories through their most dramatic images

The horizontal “page-turning” experience also allows our advertisers to reclaim the full-page ad they so dearly want and need. We allow those advertisers the chance to use the entire palate in whatever way they want to grab your attention, all the time giving you the same ability you had in print to turn the page. But watch out, you are going to see some wonderful ads that use dramatic visual tools from interactivity to video to draw you in.

Advertising in general has also changed in a big way on this site. Gone are the many small units that appears in different places on the page, frequently below the “fold” or unavailable until you scrolled down. We listened to our readers and our advertisers, and we have reacted by giving both a better experience. We have limited the advertisers to fewer but much more dramatic positions, giving them the same chance we are giving ourselves of telling their stories better and reaching more people with increasingly dramatic tools.

This is truly a major step into the new world of digital storytelling, one that empowers them, as storytellers with their own story to tell, to use every tool available: video, audio, text, photography, interactivity and more to tell his or her story. This is a step in the reinvention of storytelling, it’s also a step in the reinvention of how news will be created and consumed. We’re extremely excited to be part of that process.

Much more to come. Watch over the next few weeks as we roll out our new tablet and mobile apps, and if you haven’t recently, take a look at our print newspaper, too. It has also begun to embrace the strengths of a print product in today’s media mix and you will be surprised. And we are making it easier on all platforms for you to contact us. In the spirit of this new era of communications, please send us your comments, ideas and suggestion.

How Print Can Help Lead The Way Into The Digital Future

Today we launched the “TV On The Web” section of the USA Today Life Section.  And we did so in the printed newspaper first.

Sounds a bit backwards, you say?  Actually, it’s a great example of how various forms of media can compliment each other.  In this case, print has the advantage of being an effective curator of digital content.  There is so much digital content out there that our readers and digital users appreciate our efforts to curate that content and find the best of it for them.  And print is a very effective way to display that curated list. 

By limiting our presentation to what we can fit in one section of the paper, we easily demonstrate to our readers that we have used the scarcity of space in the paper to display the best of the content we find.  On digital platforms our list could be much longer, but on paper we are forced to live within the space we have.  It’s always harder to do anything in less space, and to make the choices we have to make to choose “only the best.”  But that makes it even more valuable to the reader, who knows he or she will get a lot for the small amount of time they have to devote to see the printed list in its entirety.

Print imposed the kind of limitations that force us to work harder for the reader.  And in the end, the consumer appreciates that we put in more work to do that for them. 

It is also much easier to do something new for a print reader, because they are already looking at the page and will notice something new and different.  On a digital platform, it is harder to draw someone to anything new because they tend to go to and get the pages they know to ask for. 

So for us at USA Today, the printed newspaper is both an editorial product and a marketing platform for the innovations we are planning across all of our platforms.   We sell that platform to other advertisers, so it should come as no surprise that we can use it effectively ourselves to prove its continuing value.

Congrats to the team for getting our new TV on the Web listings launched today, along with the fantastic coverage of Web-based video we are launching in the Life Section news columns (See today’s story on Tom Hanks and Jerry Seinfeld’s efforts to create online-only TV shows). 

TV on the Web is getting big and deserves the kind of coverage we normally give to traditional television.  How cool is it that we launch that coverage in a newspaper!

Two Years Later: How the IPad Has Changed News Consumption

Well it’s been two years and three IPads, so its a good time to step back and look at how my life as a heavy consumer of news has changed.

Much has changed.  But there is no question that I have come to use both the IPad and IPhone for a great deal of news consumption, though I still largely depend on traditional brands.  The latest IPad and IPhone have been particularly good to the news companies that embrace the tablet and mobile formats.  The speed of downloads has improved dramatically,  and the quality of video continues to improve.  And, finally, advertisers are at least trying the platforms.

Let me start with the The Daily, the first IPad native news business.  I use them more today than I did in the past.  The faster download times, the far better indexing and  briefing features and the quality of the journalism  have all made a difference, and as always, the application makes terrific use of the IPad’s true value to display beautiful photography.  It’s slickness still makes it hard for me to grasp how timely the information is — it’s almost too pretty to make you believe it’s very current — but that may just be my problem associating beautiful design with magazine journalism.  There isn’t enough video or interactive storytelling to make this a total home run yet, and too much of the video that is there  is a talking head.  I am a paid subscriber, but I don’t have the sense of urgency that I must have this product.  It think still needs some defining and exclusive content. I do love the new “Breaking News Alert” (see left) that blasted in front of the cover when the news of a foiled Al Qaeda plot was reported.

I still use the NYPost App, after it has moved into Apple’s newsstand.  It’s easy to navigate and a terrific digital manifestation of the paper’s look, feel and content, capturing much of the personality that the defines the Post.  I have subscribed and I rarely buy or see a print edition anymore.

For the several months I have been using a terrific App called “PressReader” from Newspaper Direct, which offers access to “replica” versions of hundreds of newspapers around the world in real time.  You can, for the price of a single subscription, get all the papers you want to get on the service.  Or you can buy single newspapers when you want them.  It’s a nifty App that shows the exact newspaper that is printed, but then allows you to drill down and navigate digitally by clicking on the stories you want to read.  Hard to explain, easy to use.  I have been able to keep up with the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post,  and several other publications including some British papers, on an as-needed basis.

I still read my old standby national newspapers:  The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today via their apps.  The Times is now part of the Apple Newsstand, but to me the application, while clean, loses too much of the look and feel of the times, and just seems less urgent and complete.   Too many stories are first presented with a headline and a couple paragraphs, with no graphic stimulation.   It’s easy to use, but has no soul and I frequently miss stories that I see in the Print Edition.  I still get the NYTimes printed paper at home on the weekends, and I much prefer it.

The Wall Street Journal app is a much better translation of the newspaper and its feel.  It also gives the reader a version of the journal that is updated to the time the reader has signed on.  It’s a great mix of a daily newspaper of record and updated news since printing. There is growing use of photos and video that shows real promise.

Finally the USA Today Ipad App is also very clean.  The good and the bad news about the USA Today app is that it is a close cousin to the look of the paper.  While it captures some of the design feature of the paper, some have become tired.   The site loses a sense of urgency and  news judgement by stacking stories with essentially the same look and feel as each other.  The larger layouts in the print version of the paper are often the most attractive devices in the newspaper, and they are not translated to this platform.  Photos dominate the visuals, and the reader gets little interactive or even passive, graphic presentation that approaches what is so great about the print paper.  The page looks the same every day.  USAToday’s IPhone app is slicker and faster to use.

Broadcast news outlets have become a large part of my news consumption through digital platforms as well.  On the financial news front,  I love Marketwatch, but hate that there isn’t a better presentation of it’s news product on the IPad.  There is a data app, which was recently updated, but while it’s clean and efficient, I hate that it is a fixed horizontal app, and when my IPad is in the upright position (I have a charger that leaves it vertically on my desk) the content is sideways and useless to me.  I have the same problem with the Wall Street Journal Live App.  So I have shifted to CNBC’s RT (Real Time) App, which is easy to use, gives me the most graphic depiction of Indexes, My Stocks, News (easy and efficient access to all news) and Videos and has the added bonus of being in Real-Time, not delayed data.  And, there are much better and more timely videos, which you would expect. This is CNBC’s first major success on digital platforms.

CNN’s IPad app is very visual (It should use more words) and allows the viewer to watch CNN live.  The ABC News, NBC News and CBS News Apps are all too visual, showing photos and a few words for every story, and linking to work they have largely done on TV.  They will, someday, discover that words are also important to the storytelling process on digital platforms.

All in all, I am spending a lot more time on my IPad, including the time spent on News sites.  My habits are changing…so are everyone else’s.  Clearly the transition is taking place.  But it still feels like we have some more changes to go and some new software and hardware to lead the way.

SOPA: We Can Fix This

The problem with the fight over SOPA is that no one is playing by the same rules.  In fact, there are no rules and frequently people on the same side are fighting for completely different reasons. 

In the media world, we have journalistically-minded companies who have spent a lifetime defending freedom of speech and fighting anything that seems to impair that right.   In that world such freedom overshadows the original reason for the proposed rules, which was the fact that most of those companies are losing billions of dollars because their intellectual property is being stolen and reused by others for profit.

Then we have the Googles of the world, who beat the Freedom-of-Speech drum as well, but who really are among those who have built huge businesses on the back of every content creator with little or no compensation for their content.  In their case, it’s Freedom-of-Profit and Growth that they are protecting.

Having Google out front defending the media on the SOPA issue is like having Larry Flynt be the point person defending Freedom of Speech in court.   We like what he is saying, but is he the right person to make the case around?

While this is a fight about rights for the media, for Silicon Valley its really a fight about an entirely new economic structure that tech firms have built around managing and presenting other people’s content.

The real problem is we have no standards yet to build an intelligent discussion around gray areas. Right now this has become a black and white, for or against, issue.  But like all things, there are going to be many ways to do this right and to do it wrong.  But we don’t even have fundamental building blocks in place.  We still haven’t defined, legally, what fair use is for content on the internet.  That’s something we did a long time ago for print and broadcast media.

Imagine having this fight in the print world without any existing idea of what is fair use.  None of us believe we should be able to sue someone for using a word or two that might be the same as two words in something we created last year.  But in print that doesn’t happen, because their are rules that loosely define how much of an existing work or idea you can repeat with stealing an idea or creative work.  And it’s a reasonable amount.

In television there are rules about how much video someone else can use from the creators of that video, and under what circumstances they can use it.  Beyond that, intellectual property is protected.

In both cases the industries came together and agreed on fair use.  Then  they figured out how to protect appropriate activity. 

With SOPA, the problem is everyone is shadow boxing against a massive grey cloud of “evil.”  
In the digital universe we have not brought everyone together, and we need to. It’s ridiculous to provide massive powers to shut people down when we can’t even agree on what exactly they are doing wrong.

How about as a industry, content creators of all kinds, text, video, photographic, graphic, audio, get together and come up with realistic guidelines that allow for freedom of speech and expression to grow, even around our content, and yet still make sure that those who fund the content creation itself are reimbursed appropriately for what they have given the world? Let’s try to agree on what “fair use” is before we agree on how to punish people for not being fair. 

It won’t be easy, the players in the many subsets of the content universe, music, newspapers, television all have had a hard time agreeing with each other about much simpler issues, but at least we’ll have a better idea of what we are trying to accomplish than we do now.

 

Why Media Companies Must Move Quickly To Engage Their Audiences

While media companies are starting to realize that they must continue to build their relationship with their customers in order to survive, new data suggests they better do so quickly and with the right partners.
New data from Citicorp shows how dramatically people are growing the time they spend on Facebook.
What this means is that the social platform is providing more and more content and providing its users with a preferred place to consume that content. In much the same way Apple has taken more and more of people’s time to consume content on it’s devices, Facebook has spent the time to learn how people want to consume and converge content into their routines, and continues to build devices for them to do so, on Facebook.
While this is generally a good thing for content creators, because it’s yet another outlet for content, it’s also a threat because it puts the social network squarely between the content creator and it’s audience. And the fact is, Facebook will know more about consumer behavior than the content creators will. This is the exact issue that causes the content providers to worry about Apple.
But now, like Apple, we’re beyond trying to create alternatives. Success will come to those who work best with Apple and now Facebook. It’s a long, hard road to succeed reaching today’s audiences without them.

The Secret Sauce For Yahoo: It’s About Content AND Technology

With all of the chaos at Yahoo, the debate is raging yet again: Should it be a better tech company or should it be a content company? Has it conceded so much ground in the tech arena to the likes of Google and Apple that it HAS to recreate itself as a content company, or should it try to regain the mojo that help it become a powerhouse of the last decade and build an audience of several hundred million users? Or, is content the right way to go anyway?

The answer is yes, to each question. Yahoo has talented and creative engineers and programmers. It also has a huge audience that it has monetized better than most with display advertising. But it has also been left in the dust by Google’s ability to build a monster search and direct advertising business. And it has lost significant ground in email and mobile application development. On the content side Yahoo has historically done a great job as an aggregator and shown the ability to add value in that aggregation by attracting significant audiences from its large pool of users. But it has not shown an ability to crack the new media formula that has begun to build businesses around a combination of aggregation, curation and original content (like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and others.)

The magic formula for the future involves a combination of content and technology, specifically the technology that will create new forms of storytelling and guide better and more efficient consumption of content.

We are entering an age of Convergence. Content and technology are converging to create the newest forms of storytelling and giving consumers entirely new ways to consume content. The creation of IOS and Android powered smart phones, The IPad, Kindle etc, and other developments have clearly changed the landscape and they are only the beginning.

Successful content companies will need to understand and even master new technologies and truly understand how their customers will use those technologies to consume content. In order to succeed they will have to learn how to deliver their content on the new platforms AND how to optimize their content for those platforms. If the ability to give consumer content in real time continues to grow, will content companies have to accept that more content will need to be delivered in smaller bites? Will they have to include more video or interactivity on portable devices? Will targeting that content become even more essential in order to help consumers navigate an overwhelming overload of content?

We barely know the questions to ask, much less the answers. We are starting to understand those questions, but the answers are more elusive than we think. Media companies will have to continue to pay close attention to both technology AND consumer habits, particularly how consumers continue to change their habits because of new technology.

While many companies are taking steps in these directions, no one has emerged with all the answers. Apple has done a magnificent job of matching new products with consumer demand, even helping to create the demand. But Apple has done that from the perch of a consumer products company, a hardware company. They have steadfastly avoided the creations of content and have even had very rocky relationships with many of the content creators because their interests aren’t totally aligned.

Google has done a great job of building a targeted advertising business that takes advantage of its search business to uber-target and create efficient management. But Google, too, has avoided becoming a content creator. It does generate content from some acquisitions, but for the most part it’s content created by others, like the videos on YouTube or restaurant ratings from Zagat’s readers.

So the door is open for a company that can simultaneously seek to listen to and understand it’s audience and participate in the development of technology that gives them what they want and more.

Yahoo needs to be a company that commits to creativity in both technology and content, attempting to lead in both, but only in the context of how they work together. Whether content is email, user-generated video, advertising or unique reporting from a war zone, Yahoo should be all over the process of creating and delivering content to consumers through multiple platforms.
It should also take advantage of having one of the best brands built over the past decade to create branded content on all platforms.

Gilt Becomes a Content Creator For All The Right Reasons

In today’s digital world, over time nearly every company has to become a media company. That is a cornerstone theory of my book C-Scape. The “C” stands for the four themes of change that every company, media and otherwise, has to embrace: Content is king, The Consumer is in control, Convergence is changing your business and Curation is a new skill you much embrace.

Today I got an email from the fast-growing digital shopping business Gilt, known for it’s daily sales of high-end branded products and services.

The email announced the launch of “Park & Bond,” which it described as a “new shopping destination for men.”

But let’s look at what they say you will find there:

Curation: “A curated selection of the world’s best brands, available when and where you want them.”

Consumer: “The Ability to see how virtually every item appears as part of a head-to-toe look”

Content: “Tools and Content designed to help men build an amazing wardrobe and get the most out of it, from personal shopping to buying guides and how-tos”

Convergence: “Park & Bond. It’s the New Intersection of Men & Style”

To be sure, Park & Bond is a shopping site from a commerce company, Gilt. But as a new digital business it proves that it understands the most fundamental issues around doing business today. Companies must provide much more for their customers, and create the kind of experience that helps them do everything they need to do in life, including shop. It’s simply good business.

Consumers face an overwhelming set of choices for everything they do, from reading a magazine to watching TV to buying a shirt to taking a vacation. Increasingly they need and appreciate guidance and intelligent curation of their choices. Park & Bond provides consumers with all kinds of helpful information, from “How to” stories helping some of the more style-challenged members of the male species, to details on fashion trends and advices on what to look for when buying clothing and accessories. And the context of the answers is how the customer uses the product, not how it’s sold or who sells it. There are also cultural guides and and advice on taking care of clothes.

In order to succeed as a consumer business in the future, businesses are going to have to give them more and more help in quickly and easily making the best choices they can.

Another Warning Shot To Newspapers: Don’t Give Up on Covering the News

Buried in the annual Pulitzer Prize ritual last week was the little-noticed fact that no award was given in the “Breaking News” category. None of the 37 entries were deemed exceptional enough.

Last year’s winner, the Seattle Times, used multiple platforms to report the breaking news about the tragic killings of four policemen. The Pulitzer judges have begun to acknowledge the fact that breaking news now happens on multiple platforms, with the printed version being the least important. Sadly, not enough newspapers felt they had demonstrated the kind of breadth of coverage on breaking news events that would be worthy of a breaking news prize.

This raises yet another serious concern about where the newspaper industry is heading. Newspaper companies, in order to stay relevant and stay in business, need to remain the organizations that bring the news to the public, no matter what the platform. The print component of that mix will continue to drop as more and more digital platforms are created, and more and more people use those platforms to consume timely news and information they want.

The first reaction of any newspaper to breaking news needs to be how can it inform the most people of this new in the shortest time and add the most context and perspective at the same time. It’s that initial hunger to inform the public that every newspaperman was born with that has to be nurtured. The only difference is there are new and better ways to tell stories, and the public is figuring that out, too. To cede the digital platforms to amateurs and start ups is to ignore the audience you have served so well in the past.

That means giving news to your customers in the form they want it, not necessarily the most convenient way for the newspaper to deliver it. Newspaper companies may own presses that you have to pay to support, and they may own trucks that deliver those papers, but that doesn’t mean that a printed paper delivered to a home or newsstand still represents the best way to transmit news.

But what is the same is the need to help people understand what is happening and why it is important. Someone still must report the events as they unfold AND enlighten people to the importance and value of that information on a continuing basis. Even in a rapidly changing digital world, newspapers had a big jump on any competition because they still employ the most people who are trained to gather and evaluate information. Unfortunately, those people were also trained to tell those stories on a newspaper’s schedule. And the public has quickly been trained to get their news differently, while the industry has been slow to train the storytellers in these new technologies.

Gradually the news industry will see non-print publishers stepping up, as Pro Publica did this year, and winning the highest awards. The Pro Publica award this year was for the best national reporting, not best national reporting by a digital organization. If the newspaper industry gives up on breaking news, they should just close their doors. They need to jump on stories and get them out there on every platform as fast as anyone else. They need to curate breaking news content in real-time. They can’t do it by cutting back on the the people needed to gather and disseminate the news.

When the Japanese earthquake happened a few weeks back, I learned about it first on twitter. My immediate reaction was to go to half a dozen trusted news sites. The first five didn’t have a word on their front pages and the sixth had a bulletin across the top of their page. I went back to twitter and there were thousands of tweets pouring in from all over the world, including the earthquake regions.
Still, I craved some filter that would help me put it in perspective.

News companies have to provide that perspective, and editorial intelligence. It is what separates them from amateurs who are blindly passing along information. As technology reduces the cost of transmitting information, the cost of a well-trained, talented workforce will and should become a larger portion of any news company’s budget.

It should be no surprise that doing their job well is going to be hard work and require training and investment. That hasn’t changed. Great journalism can and will happen. It remains to be seen if the existing newspaper industry will figure out that it has to follow the news, not try to force it into an outmoded print model.

Why Every Company and Industry Should Be Concerned About Preserving Quality Journalism: A Plea to Foundations

The Knight Foundation has issued a call to all philanthropic foundations to seriously consider funding efforts to preserver quality journalism and the development of media skills in the new digital frontier. The goal is to get a wider range of funders involved in supporting media and journalism projects, which Knight believes can increase the number of informed citizens and advocates for change.

The foundation has produced a guide to help potential funders to understand how they can get involved in saving the fourth estate.

But there are other reasons for foundations to support the development of digital media initiatives. In the future, every company has to become more of a media company. Now that they can be in much more direct touch with their customers, due to the growth of social media and digital platforms that allow everyone access to much more information, companies are finding that they need to understand how to communicate with their constituencies.

It’s no longer enough for businesses or industries to broadcast information to their customers, partners and even employees via media outlets, press releases and advertising. Those are traditionally one-way communications accomplished through outside media. Today, your constituents require a conversation. Information now STARTS to flow when it’s first posted or offered. Comments, responses, reactions, postings are all part of the ecosystem. Non-Media companies now need people with sophisticated media and communications skills. Those people need to be trained in those skills and need to embrace and understand what they do and what journalism does so they can help the company, or industry, communicate with and react to both direct contact with people and journalistic coverage.

The Knight foundation, the preeminent funder of journalism projects in the United States, is offering to help other foundations understand how to best look at media projects:

“In the digital age, you have plenty of options. Many do not require large dollar investments. You can fund the efforts of existing media or you can develop your own initiatives. You can work with partners to increase the reach of your efforts or you can create independent organizations. You can build an information component into an initiative you’re already funding or you can research information needs in your community to make your grant making more strategic.”

Murdoch’s “The Daily” – What Works, What Doesn’t (Most of It)

I’ve had “The Daily” app on my IPad since the day it was launched. I couldn’t wait to get it because of my unwavering belief that the Tablet format will quickly become a significant platform for news and other timely information. I still believe that, but it’s despite The Daily and not because of it. Ironically its the apps from Rupert Murdoch’s own NY Post and other traditional publishers that still give me hope that this medium will grow quickly.

I am thrilled that Murdoch launched “The Daily.” I strongly believe success in this medium requires the creation of dedicated content products, products that are made for the tablet medium, not adapted from earlier platforms, whether print, digital or video. And I truly understand the need, at this stage, to experiment with presentation, content and format. Everything will, and should, get better.

I was particularly cheered to read about the memo Daily Editor Jesse Angelo sent out after a tough week. “We need to get out there and start finding more compelling stories from around the country– not just scraping the web and the wires, but getting out on the ground and reporting.” The news brands of the future need to provide a mix of original reporting, curation of outside voices and community. All are important, and the many new players in the news and information space are unable to create first rate original reporting because they don’t realize how hard it is to do.

So let’s assume The Daily is produced by people who do understand journalism, and Angelo’s missive is a good indication that we have that piece in place. The problem right now lies in the vision behind the art of storytelling on this new medium, and the ability to executive whatever that vision is.

What I’ve seen is very little indication that the designers are thinking about the best use of the new platform medium. The advantages of the platform are obvious:
1) It is both fast and beautiful.
2) It is interactive
3) It is real time via either wifi or 3G/4G
4) Advertising stands out
5) It can use all forms of media: text, video, audio, photography, graphics AND interactivity

But in my first few weeks of using “The Daily” I have been particularly disappointed in its design, functionality and performance. It’s been a series of crashes, bad user interface and clunky design.

More than half the time I touch the Icon to start up “The Daily”, nothing happens. Another 25% of the time, if I wait long enough, I get the intro music and the graphic shows me it’s launch sequence. Then the screen goes blank. Sometimes, after that, the new edition of the daily comes up in it’s “wheel” format, with a video opening that resembles the top of a TV news broadcast by teasing the top three or four stories. Other times, after about 15 seconds, my screen just returns to the IPad Icons and I have to start over.

Combining the slow, frequently faulty, launch sequence with the fact that when and if it does launch it brings me to a television like lead-in, followed by a visual magazine-format cover, a major frustration is how long it takes me to learn about ANYTHING going on. Nothing feels urgent or timely. It’s much more like a magazine or TV news magazine, than a newspaper, daily or otherwise. This is made worse by the fact that the content of The Daily appears to be updated only once-a-day, an odd choice for a 24/7 medium.

Perhaps this is by design. Perhaps the goal is to take advantage of how beautiful graphics and advertising are in this medium, but using a magazine model as the first foray into the newest real-time medium. And it is also certainly true that no where is it written that the tablet version of news has to resemble a newspaper. But if it is going to make the best use of this new medium, it needs to embrace the zeitgeist of the device. It needs to be fast and to give it’s users the ability to get what they want quickly and in a timely way.

Instead, this app sacrifices speed and usability for beauty. There are no real shortcuts to sections, only to the “cover” story of each section, creating the need for multiple clicks to get to anywhere. Indexing is weak, albeit non existent. These and other shortcomings seem to indicate an inability to understand why and how users use this device.

A dozen times or so I’ve been teased with an ad to designate my favorite sports teams on the App, which presumably would result in a customized page with news from the teams I selected. But despite the fact that I have tried to set this page several times, I’ve never succeeded. As soon as I finish, I try to store the page and my settings and it’s gone — never to be seen again. I tried again today, found the ad, and this time tapped it 20 times before I realized it’s not taking me anywhere to do anything.

If i step out of the room for a few minutes and come back, the app has booted me out and put me back on my home screen. I don’t know how to change that setting, and there is no way to find out.

In the end I have to say that while this is a “pretty” product its much closer to a magazine, with little or no sense of urgency and a shocking inability to address user behavior on a new medium. Shocking because even some of Murdoch’s newspapers are doing a better job on the IPad, particularly the New York Post, which at least provides a touch and feel that allows the reader to find anything that was in the paper and in the news.

I’m still pulling for the ultimate success of The Daily, and I give Murdoch huge credit for spending the money to test the tablet.