Thursday, March 22, 2012

Gadget Users Hungrier for News, but Media Still Lags in Profit

Techland reports Gadget Users Hungrier for News, but Media Still Lags in Profit. "It’s a bittersweet tune for the news industry: Though Americans have a budding appetite for news, Silicon Valley is reaping the benefits of those cravings, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism."

I can't say I'm surprised. I hate most news web sites. I get most of my news from RSS feeds and if the article is interesting I'll read it in Reader using Readability or if necessary click through to the full article. If it's long I'll save it in Instapaper to read later. I get breaking news first from Twitter, usually from one of several news feeds I follow. I do subscribe to the NY Times on the iPad because there was a reasonable deal ($5/week) for 6 months. I'm not sure I'll continue it when that time is up. I only rarely go to the NY Times iPad App, but I do read columnists like Krugman and need web access now to see the full articles. I hate how most news web sites are formatted and really want a single-page view and a good font. Something like Readability or Instapaper or Safari's Reader mode are really important to me. I don't think I'd read the articles without it. I'd be fine with a few ads on the sides if they didn't move and didn't make me wait for them to load but that rarely seems the case now.

On the other hand, I'm starting to enjoy some magazines on the iPad. I pay $100+ a year for the Economist and thinks it's a great experience. I get to download the issue on Thu and it's pleasant to read. Though without the stack of magazines building up on the coffee table, I find I can fall behind even easier now. Entertainment Weekly is also a pretty good experience (the first couple of issues really annoyed me on formatting but it's improved). Wired is ok, but the downloads are still too big and slow (though they've gotten much smaller in the last few months. Still, I find the embedded videos to be merely annoying instead of an intrinsically better experience to the articles. Finally, The Atlantic is ok. I think if you're a magazine and you have a separate mode for "Reading" you're doing it wrong. But I happily pay for all of the above. I For all but the Economist I still get the paper editions which I think is crazy, but that was the cheaper way to subscribe. Something's wrong with that (I get it that paper subscribers are worth more to advertisers but I don't read the paper anymore so I expect they'll realize that soon and work it into their pricing).

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