In this morning’s dead-trees edition of the StarTribune, a full page ad appeared announcing the availability of the StarTribune iPad app. Downloading and launching it presents you with a clean, easy to use interface, optimized for a tablet-sized device.
Offering a complimentary subscription until October 16th, the StarTribune iPad app joins many daily newspapers who are hoping that tablet access will shift people away from newsprint versions and bring in non-newspapers readers (i.e., the under-35 crowd). Ironically the current StarTribune website offers a great experience already on an iPad, so it will remain to be seen if people will choose a native iPad app over the website itself.
The app loads quickly, stories load fast, and there is little of the latency one expects with ad serving, a typical problem on many newspaper websites where page loads stall while ads are fetched from an ad server elsewhere. With its minimalistic and clean look, it’s a pleasure to read.
One startling and glaring omission is the lack of social sharing, especially if the StarTribune truly cares to go after those non-newspaper readers mentioned above. While most smartphone and tablet news apps enable the reader to send an article via email or to Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, StarTribune has only enabled email. This makes the app significantly less useful for anyone using social media technologies.
The other aspect of using the app that was troublesome was how obvious it now is that the StarTribune — like most daily newspapers around the country — reprint articles from major dailies like the New York Times, Washington Post, LATimes and also from the major newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters. Unfortunately for the StarTribune, there are so many apps with which we can access these same stories, that it makes StarTribune reprinted ones far too obvious and redundant. (For more on this problem and others in the newspaper business, see my personal blog post, “How to Save Newspapers (But do we even care?)“).
StarTribune’s new iPad app is an acceptable first effort, but getting in to the game so late we expected more from this hometown paper. The good news is that they will be able to take feedback and iterate the app so new features will (hopefully) be added over time. We’d like to see more social features added, a larger emphasis on local vs. national news (especially “above the fold” on the first page after launch), video and audio (e.g., podcasts), ongoing reference material that would be “evergreen” and always available (e.g., directories, restaurant reviews, visitor information, guides) and other content that would make using this app (and paying for a subscription come October) a much richer, and more local, experience.