Apple’s most recent venture provides a not-so-new news experience
Review & Photos by Albert Jung

For someone like me who is majoring in international studies and communications studies, finding an effective way to get the most recent news has always been a challenge. Newspapers can be hard to find in printed form, and reading on a computer screen isn’t always a pleasant experience. Thankfully, last year’s introduction of the iPad solved most of this problem for me.
Newspaper applications on the iPad provide access to the most recent news; however, most of them are nothing more than a newspaper resized to fit the screen. This is fine as long as you just want to read a newspaper without any interactive features or reader-appealing designs. That’s where The Daily comes in.
The first news application developed exclusively for iPad, The Daily makes use of features available only on that specific piece of technology. For example, instead of a simple list with text headlines, The Daily allows a reader to scroll through an interactive list of news with previews. This might look like a simple change, but it makes a huge difference. You can see a picture of the information an article provides without actually clicking it, you can see how long an article is before starting to read it, and you can save time skipping unnecessary articles.
In addition, The Daily features fewer advertisements. Many other news applications use ads that interrupt a reader for a few seconds and require a reader to click “skip.” However, The Daily is just like reading a magazine. Advertisements are between pages and you can flip over them quickly.
All this being said, The Daily still has many issues to address. Even with the most recent version, the screen glitches when I flip through articles and sometimes crashes. Considering it was just released on February 2, I hope to see improvements made on performance and stability in the near future.
Multimedia experience with The Daily is another disappointment thus far. The Daily features videos and pictures, but there’s nothing special about them compared to the work of other news sources. You just play videos or look at pictures that are incorporated into written articles, like what a reader does with the BBC or New York Times apps. It would be better if The Daily utilized iPad’s graphic capabilities to create interactive videos and pictures, just like it did with its main menu and opening sequence.
In taking such steps, however, The Daily staff needs to keep in mind that not all iPad features are cool enough to use. For example, some articles show different content depending on which way the reader is holding his or her iPad. Seeing pictures when the screen is horizontal and seeing text when the screen is vertical might sound like a perfect way to use an exclusive iPad feature, but there are people (like myself) who use stands that only support one orientation. Taking the iPad from the stand and holding it just to see text is hardly convenient.
There’s no doubt that The Daily provides a new way to get news. As the first news application that was developed exclusively for an iPad, it has a lot of convenient and exciting features. However, it does not differ significantly from other existing news applications when it comes to acquiring news. Most of the features are focused on the appearance of the application, not on effectively communicating news.
Currently, The Daily requires a paid subscription after offering two weeks free. Personally, I don’t think the publication’s features are enough to justify the cost. I’d rather get the same news for free from other apps, even if they do come with inconveniences. Still, there’s no doubt that The Daily has a lot of potential. If the creators can utilize the iPad’s features not only for appearance but also for communication, this new news outlet could spark a whole new kind of journalism.

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