As we all know, the news industry has been losing the battle in the slow (now quicker) move away from print. It seems people just don’t have the time nor money to spend reading the paper every morning, especially when people would just as soon get their news for free online. In fact we want more news; but we want it online, bite-sized, on-demand, and FREE.
The New York Times is one of the most internationally recognized news sources and yet even they have fallen on hard times. But refusing to go down without a fight, they’ve released version 2.0 of their Times Reader. This version promised to be a huge step forward so I decided to spend a few days with it.
First things first, this things costs $3.45 per week. But isn’t it just delivering the same thing that NYTimes does for free? Well not entirely. The application that runs on any Mac or PC with Adobe Air installed will download the news for each day automatically, and store everything locally on your machine. So no need to worry weather you are near a hotspot. In addition, rather than a constantly changing set of news like NYTimes.com, it does it’s best to represent the stories and sections for that days worth of news. In fact it even keeps the last seven days of data on your machine. Want to see what last Tuesdays front page stories were? Just click to read the Tuesday paper. In fact you’ll even get a fully interactive version of each day’s crossword puzzle. Nice. The only section that requires an internet connection is ‘News in Video.’
But what really separates Times Reader 2.0 from the Times website is the way you experience the news. While reading articles on the web seem to fall victim to our tiny online attention spans, using the Reader almost forces you to sit down and read the paper, drink your coffee, and relax. Of course it’s not quite like sitting over good ol’ fashioned news print, this seems to be a happy medium that can successfully live in our digital lives. The layout of the articles have a very print-esque quality, using multiple columns, and page like navigation, rather than endlessly scrolling vertical columns of text.
The execution of the design and experience is spot on. This being a Flex/Flash based app, they’ve made it intelligent enough to format the text, columns, and images into the available space based on your screen size. Navigate directly to stories from the ‘front page’ of each section, or you can even thumb your way through the paper in a more digital matter. Using your arrow keys allows you to quickly slide from story to story and page to page within the stories. The left navigation from section jumping may be hidden to full enjoy the article.
One of the best interactive features is the ability to zoom out and pan around all the stories from the days paper, almost like quickly scanning through the pages of a real paper. Small details such as the zoomed out view transitioning seamlessly to the full article regardless of your browser size did not go unnoticed (interactive design geeks will notice this.)
But at the end of the day, is this worth the extra price per week? I can’t answer that for everyone. But I can say I far prefer reading the news with Times Reader to reading the news on the Times website. This feels like a happy hybrid between the web and the physical paper. Plus my fingers aren’t turned black after reading and I’m not wasting pounds of paper at time.
Generally speaking, we expect more and more information to be free. But that doesn’t mean that we are unwilling to pay for a superior delivery. We’ll pay $1 to download a song from apple because it’s faster and easier than the free methods. We are willing to pay money for movies and TV shows if the system is on-demand, high-quality, and reliable. I think the same applies to our news. If there was one improvement I’d say allow people to purchase one days paper at a time. Might be an interesting test to see what readers prefer.
I’m happy so far with Times Reader, and very satisfied with the overall experience. I’d highly recommend anyone at least give it a try. The true test will be whether or not the weekly price tag seems worth it.
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Thanks for the feedback Robert! There’s a free version available. Can you replace the link you have to Times Reader 2.0 to this link: http://timesreader.nytimes.com/timesreader/index.html
Thanks!
Sharon
Sharon S | July 14th, 2009