The Daily

Tomorrow my free two week subscription to The Daily from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation comes to an end.

The paper contains the following sections: news, business, gossip, opinion, arts & life, apps & games, and sports.  The news, business, arts & life, apps & games, and sports sections are good, but the whole thing tends towards the sensationalist, the gossip is mostly disgusting, and the opinion page leans way towards the right for a newspaper.

The format is good; not quite as useful as Time magazine for the iPad, but the customization of the weather and sports is good.  And the embedded games are a really good idea.

So will I be paying the $49.99 to get a one year subscription?  No.  The reactionary bent, the sensationalistic style, and the lack of comics are the main reason, in addition, they still have some technical work to do too.  Every time you launch the app, it takes a long time to figure out that you’ve already downloaded today’s issue before it pops up for you to use, and if you switch away to another app the whole download sequence seems to occur again when you return.  You cannot go back to a previous days issue to reread an article unless you have marked the article to save it.  And to top it all off, I can’t highlight and copy a chunk of text to quote it on my blog, or in a tweet; and there is no search function.

I really like the idea of the paper and the format created for the tablet computer form, but I shall wait for a while and look at it again in a six months to see if they’ve made any technical improvements or content changes.