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Newstream is your personal newspaper for iOS

Drew Olanoff — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:30:20 +0000

If you’re looking for an alternative to the newly redesigned Google Reader for your iOS device, Newstream might be a good option.

The app turns feeds of any type into a clean newspaper layout, much like Flipboard does on the iPad. It’s simple, yet extremely functional at the same time. The design is a bit reminiscent of recently updated Instapaper, but Newstream stands alone as a discovery app, not based on the premise of marking things to read later.

Discovering feeds to read on Newstream

RSS feeds haven’t been the most consumer friendly technology. Most people don’t understand the technology behind what an RSS feed is, so Newstream takes that confusion out of the equation. Simply search for things or publications that interest you and add it to your saved feeds.

Newstream lets you turn images off, and asks you whether you want to see a full story or just a summary. Not a lot of options here, but it’s well executed.

Reading your news

When you open Newstream, you can swipe from right to left to cycle through your subscriptions. It’s nice to have a mix of blogs as well as Twitter feeds, as everything shows up in the same clean design.

Once you’ve read an article you can Tweet it, email, or post it to Facebook. The simplicity of Newstream shines through here, not giving you a lot of useless bells and whistles. The newspaper-like layout is easy on the eyes at any brightness level, and the Flipboard style swiping lets you consume a lot of information quickly.

Once in a while you’ll catch Newstream showing random HTML tags, but that’s easy to overlook and doesn’t seem to be a huge issue.

After spending a few days with Newstream, I’ve decided that it’s the easiest way to add more publications to my reading on the go. It also gave me the opportunity to start from scratch with my reading list, which was nice. There’s no desktop version or way to manage your subscriptions online though, which is a plus of a service like Google Reader. The app is $2.99, and will serve you well if you’re suffering from information overload.

The Daily “iPad newspaper” will reportedly launch on Android this spring

Courtney Boyd Myers — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:24:14 +0000

As first reported by AllThingsD, sources say Rupert Murdoch’s famed “iPad newspaper”, The Daily will be coming to Android tablets this spring.

At its launch event earlier this month, Murdoch said he expected The Daily to be on all major tablets in the future, but was quoted saying that “last year, this year and maybe next year belong to iPad.”

So it is a bit surprising to hear that the “iPad newspaper” could appear on tablets like Motorola’s XOOM in just a few months time.

For now The Daily is sold exclusively through the Apple store.

Read here for Everything You Need to Know About the Daily’s Launch.

The Age of the Infographic: The Guardian Launches Its “Data Journalism” Site Today

Courtney Boyd Myers — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:21:36 +0000

Who doesn’t love infographics? Today, The Guardian, a British national daily newspaper and website launches its “Data journalism” site as a new way to visualize content and understand the news.

[Journalism is] going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country. Tim Berners-Lee

Visualizing data is so much easier and more pleasurable than poring over paragraphs of description or even worse- spreadsheets. But they take a lot of work, both in data gathering and in design. It’s fantastic that the Guardian is dedicated an entire site to this effort. Its site will include ”key data of the day,” their “pick of the data blogosphere,” world government data and featured apps.

Should The Daily Beast launch a print edition?

Alex Wilhelm — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:59:52 +0000

IAC, the parent company to the upstart internet news destination ‘The Daily Beast‘ has expressed interest in taking the website to the streets with a print edition. The idea is not as crazy as it sounds, Politico has had a successful print version for years.

The important questions that surround the concept are what will make it into the print edition, where it will be distributed, and who will pay for it. Politico, to use the only other useful example of a website launching a newspaper, distributes its paper around the DC area for free while charging hundreds of dollars per year if you want it but don’t live near a free distribution point.

The strategy has been successful, with the readership so targeted that the paper commands very high advertising rates. This put the paper on near revenue parity two years ago with the normal Politico website. One year ago the newspaper had a circulation of around 32,000.

The Daily Beast does have a problem in moving from the digital world to the print real however in that it is something of an aggregator. The Daily Beast actually started out as nearly a full aggregator, but has moved into more and more original content. In a recent interview, Beast’s editor Tina Brown (pictured below) fielded the following question:

The Daily Beast started as an aggregator with some original reporting as a side dish. But the site seems to be cranking out its own articles and now the aggregation is complementary.

Correct. The natural creativity of the staff morphed The Daily Beast very fast into what has become a newsroom. Aggregation lives on the Cheat Sheet, the video player, and in the breaking news slot in the first big box. The rest is all original, generated by Beast writers and editors.

And so you have to ask the question, if the aggregation is still ‘complementary,’ and that the Beast most likely does not have reprint rights on that content, can it fill a full newspaper (say distributed three times a week) with its original content, or is it still too dependent on linking out to other sources?

This is not an idle question. Given that the temporal constraints of publishing a newspaper that has to last several (two to three depending on the decided cycle) days on a newsstand and still attract readers, The Daily Beast will have to depend heavily on longer form, less ‘breaking’ centric coverage that does not lose value by the minute as is the case with much online content. That said, the website does have that sort of content, this is just a question of quantity.

What would be most interesting in all of this was if The Daily Beast did not distribute its paper for free in the same areas where Politico’s is offered free of charge. The question of what content is worth is about to enter a new chapter it seems, with the upstarts treading historically backwards into print.

Can they make it work over the next ten years? Perhaps. The overhead of a website is so low that the architecture required for print may just be financially feasible. Whether they make the jump or not, a final thought that may impact the website is this: Politico is a more focused publication than The Daily Beast, a fact that may impact the Beast’s ability to garner a dedicated print readership.

Apple set to announce new subscription service for newspapers

Alex Wilhelm — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:44:28 +0000

Newspapers are desperate the rub up against the world of Apple in hopes that some of the literal gold that coats the company will stick to themselves. That in mind, newspapers want to begin selling their wares on every iPad that they can.

Apple agrees with the idea, but is running the show in their own way. According to an in depth report, Apple has built a platform that will allow for newspapers to charge a recurring fee for their paper and collect reader information to be sent to advertisers.

Information on who is reading is crucial for any publication looking to find the best advertising partners at the highest rates.

Apple and the newspapers had differing visions on how Apple should be compensated for providing the platform and delivery system to consumers. Apple is expected to take a cut of both subscriptions fees and advertising dollars, while the publications wanted to pay Apple a flat rate.

Apple, controller of their own platform, seems to have wrung out the terms that they wanted.

As the iPad continues to sell at brisk rates around the world, the potential for newspapers to claw out a real recurring revenue roost grows. Apple is more than happy to oblige that potential, for a price.

More as it comes.