The Albuquerque Journal has launched an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch app that makes a replica of the newspaper available daily. The app is free and for the rest of September you can download the daily edition free too.
What will be interesting is whether the Journal will make electronic subscriptions available at a reasonable price without requiring a subscription to the printed version as has been the case. By reasonable I’m thinking something like the San Francisco Chronicle‘s $5.99/month, $59.99/year.
Personally I don’t care much for most newspaper websites, though their content is often superb. I find the homepages inordinately cluttered, as if in printed version parlance they were trying to get the whole newspaper onto the front page. Various apps generally are much better at presenting digestible portions. For example, I think the best way to see what’s in The New York Times is the Times Skimmer.
The internet has proven an insurmountable challenge for most newspapers. Not only do they still — necessarily — rely on the printed edition for most of their revenue, but — and I think this has been the bigger underlying problem — there is no longer much need for their amalgamation of news, sports, comics, features, weather, gossip, advice to the lovelorn, photos, TV listings, movie reviews, etc. We can find all that and more in great detail with just a few clicks. Perhaps newspapers should have honed their uniqueness — local news and local sports — and foregone the rest. I don’t know.