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.
August 8th, 2011 at 12:08 pm
The Star Tribune iPad App is crashing. Perhaps their servers are overloaded. I was able to download and install the app, but it never starts up successfully. All my other apps are working just fine (iPad 1)
August 8th, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Rich–I’m sorry you are having problems. Can you email me directly at jim.bernard@startribune.com? We aren’t aware of any crashing and if you could help us identify the possible issues that would be great. Thanks.
August 8th, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Great review Steve–glad you found the app to be useful. I thought I might provide a bit of additional color to our experience that might be interesting to your readers.
The first and most important decision we made regarding the app was to build the app locally. Most newspapers our size essentially rent software from other places–we had bids from at least three of these outfits. What you get is an app that has fixed parameters and does an acceptable job of getting your content out to users.
We rejected this idea because we felt that the tablet form is transformational for readers. We believe that understanding this form and owning the code and responsibility for updating and enhancing it will be as important as owning our own website code. We did not want to have to explain to a shop in New York why weather needed to be prominent in any publication for Minnesotans.
We enhanced our team by partnering with a local mobile shop called Drive Train Agency (http://drivetrainagency.com/). What we loved about working with them is that they not only understood the technology but were passionate about this product and what was unique about the Star Tribune and its readers. They are, like us, Minnesotans.
Many small but important elements about the application came from the partnership of our editorial team and local technical talent. These are subtle but important–how the pages swipe, what happens when a photo has enough resolution to be shown in two columns, how to handle personalities like our columnists. We discussed and iterated on these issues and the overall impact is a level of quality that is on par with any of the national media brands.
Let me share one example: we included obituaries in our application. We know this is popular with readers of the print edition, we know that it does lots of traffic on the web. We decided to build it into our first version to illustrate the breadth of what this can offer–an app experience that not only includes awesome iPad features like video but also a tasteful display of this very important category of news about local people and relationships in our community.
To be sure this app is version one. We know that sharing is important and will extend that service in subsequent versions. We could have worked on version one until the middle of next year! Instead we drew a line and rolled out what we think is a very solid offering.
The Star Tribune is in a very active investment cycle, particularly in the digital space. We rolled out a great new website in April, a brand new autos site in March, new mobile site in July and now an iPad app. We have two or three big things brewing between now and Halloween–I’d love to come on the podcast and give your audience a preview…
Jim Bernard
SVP, Digital
Star Tribune Media Company
August 8th, 2011 at 8:24 pm
Jim,
Thanks for the detailed comment. We know Drive Train and they’re top notch…you picked an outstanding group.
I know how easy it is to Monday-morning-quarterback someone else’s efforts. It’s why I sometimes detest doing a critique and we don’t do many of them (we’re more cheerleaders than shouting fans in the stands). But if I didn’t love this town, this State, and the many decades of enjoyable Strib newspaper reading, I wouldn’t have put in my review the salient points about an iPad app and the features it has to deliver in order to be a player.
Glad to hear you’re planning to successively iterate the app and have good things in store. We’d really enjoy having you on the podcast and September is shaping up to be pretty open for Friday morning ‘casts. (Ping me at: steve (at) minnov8 (dot) com).
No question that anyone who cares about newspapers and especially investigative journalism has great angst over the downtrending within the industry. Anything we can do to help you with your opening the door to native app reading on iPad (and other devices?) we’re open to do. Again, thanks for weighing in!