It's been clear to me from the start that The Daily, the new iPad "newspaper"--for lack of a better word--is exactly what the Apple tablet device was made for. I downloaded the app last week and have been following it ever since. But unfortunately, it's not without its own set of problems.
I'm not sure I'm the right person for The Daily, but I sure like the idea of it. Essentially it's an iPad daily paper, one with video, vivid photos that move, charts that grow, and more. You can tell it's still in its infancy and that the programmers and writers are feeling their way about this absolutely new medium, and that's exciting. Some things work, others don't. I'm sad to say the level of illustration I've seen so far in The Daily is far from professional-looking, so maybe that's something they should steer away from. The photos are wonderful, the writing--well, not so much.
When it comes to articles, The Daily stands midway between a traditional newsweekly and USA Today, while maybe leaning a little more to the latter. There's no Pulitzer Prize writing going on here, and there's not likely to be any. And at times the filler material, especially at the end of the news section, seems like something out of The Grit or Readers' Digest, the large print version.
I'm not much of a sports fan, but their Sports section seems appropriately beefy and informative to me. The Daily's movie and book reviews leave something to be desired and often are the one thing that repeats from day to day. The Gossip section is negligible, as most such sections are to me in any publication, and the Arts section seems more geared towards trendy crap than not. There's also an Opinion section, one part of a traditional newspaper that I always ignore, and a more new-fangled Apps and Games section, featuring a crossword puzzle and Sudoku page that ties into Apple's game center app. And of course, there's the inevitable advertising, most "pages" of which are animated or contain video of some sort.
Where The Daily excels is in how its using this new medium. You can see a lot of thought and experimentation at work, and I'm hoping this is just the opening salvo in what the iPad--or any tablet computer--can do. Maybe this is the future of the daily newspaper. But before that can be decided, the people behind The Daily need to figure out how to deliver it to its audience. Today I attempted over 15 times to download the latest issue to no avail. I don't know if it's there Super Bowl commercial that has caused a log-jam on the Internet in trying to get it, or if there's a different problem. Earlier today I loaded the update to their app, hoping this would solve yesterday's similar problem. Today it's even worse. The thing starts up with it's usual logo screen and then attempts to load the latest issue and fails, dropping out of the app itself and returning to my iPad's home screen. At $39.99 for a year, The Daily seems like something I would invest in, but I'm not paying that much money to look at a screen that grinds away while saying to me "A new issue of The Daily is being loaded." No, it's not. Not right now.
I'm about to try again...wish me luck. I'm hoping this doesn't resort to Rupert Murdoch--unfortunately the man behind The Daily, which makes its intent suspect to a lot of people--hiring a fleet of paperboys to ride their bikes through the streets of America, throwing iPads with a deafening crash onto front porches. But right now the technological crash I keep hearing as I attempt to read the latest issue is just as loud.
ADDED: Deleting the app and downloading it again helped with the problem mentioned above.
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