Tacoma News Tribune: WA Latest

TNT hates senior citizens. Not all seniors have technology skills and they are cutting back on our paper news to satisfy people who stare at their devices all the time. We are a huge number and being pushed aside like we don’t mean anything to society that wants to force people into only using technology. Technology has gotten out of control example the damage drones can do and it’s only a matter of time before we will be afraid to leave our homes. So ignore the seniors you will probably totally fold before long so TNT employees better start looking for new jobs technology will replace even you.

I do not like this app at all, jumps all over and makes it difficult to read the whole story. It is also hard to make the font larger and get the whole article you are trying to read.

I was a long-time (20+ years) subscriber to the TNT before stopping in 2014. Very recently I re-subscribed, mainly because I believe local newspapers are (or at least should be) an important contributor towards having an educated populace. But if this app is any indication of the direction the TNT has taken over the past four years, my return to the subscriber fold may be brief. My biggest complaint about this app is: advertisements take up 50% of reading space! When you view a story, you’ll see a full-width photo or video at the top. Below that, though, the presentation is split into two equal-width (and unadjustable) columns - the left half holds the article’s content, and the right half is reserved for ads. You can go into settings and adjust the font size (which is poor app design in itself), but that just means larger letters will be squeezed into the left-most, 50%-width, column. This makes for an annoying reading experience, especially for long-form articles - way too much scrolling involved; plus the constant distraction of animated advertisements makes it extremely difficult to read the articles with any sort of focus. One might argue “well, they need the revenue from the advertisements” - but, in the end, that’s not my problem as a subscriber. Like any business, if their services aren’t meeting my needs as a customer, I have no compelling reason to continue giving them my money. The only reason I didn’t give this app ONE star is because there is still worthwhile content here, even if they make it annoyingly difficult to extract its full value. Obviously the rank-and-file workers still care about doing quality work and providing informative content. It’s unfortunate the newspaper’s leadership doesn’t make that a higher priority.