The Philadelphia Inquirer

Unlike the New York Times, when I receive story alerts from The Inquirer, there’s a cumbersome sign-in process etc. that doesn’t work at all. Subscribed readers cannot immediately access the stories. Then, when I try to find the story via the app, your website seems to be full of non-prioritized stories mixed in with goofy sports topics and other mundane articles. It is super frustrating and confusing. Meanwhile, story alerts from the NYTimes are ALWAYS immediately accessible. And although I was impressed with the Inky’s coverage of the escaped Chester County convict that I found within the app this morning, generally I find your stories uninteresting and sketchy. It seems that the story selections and angles are trite, basic and mundane — even on page 1. A scan of the images of Inquirer staffers indicates that the proportion of reporters and editors who are African-descended must be improved. It seems that the paper needs to hire more Philadelphia natives of color with less focus on bringing in others from outside the region with so called traditional European-American perspectives and values. On that note, the “More Perfect Union” project really seemed to suffer from generally shallow story selections and other issues because of what seems to have been the need for more local or native African-descended editors, scholars and reporters — perhaps including a few African-descendants from other locales with at least 15-20 years of working and living in the Philadelphia area.

Disregard the negative reviews over the bias behind this paper; That is the equivalent of complaining about the lack of steak options at a vegan restaurant. As a engineer in the software industry, I can say that the team at the Inquirer has far exceeded expectation for what a news app should be and set the bar for what is to be expected for competition. The user experience of the application is superb and the "newspaper" view provides a seamless paperless reading experience for those who want to experience the newspaper without contributing to needless waste. While other applications from reporting outlets larger than the Inquirer adopt the lazy approach of providing an experience which mirrors that of reading the news on their website, the Inquirer has appropriately invested resources into providing an application which allows users to experience that day's newspaper digitally.

Update 2: randomly they decided to charge my card and I don’t know how they got my card number. It also says “manually keyed”. I will be filing a dispute with my bank. I deleted their app long ago because it is glitchy and now they have stolen my money. Update: still haven’t made the app stable. In addition, I wanted to cancel my subscription but then they emailed me and told me that memberships can only be cancelled by a phone call. Uh, what? So I can sign up online but you don’t want to let me cancel online? What are you? A gym? I don’t believe that it’s right when companies do this. I think it’s a little shady. Luckily I used PayPal and have cancelled the billing agreement so I won’t be charged again. I thought “hey, why not support local journalism” except the only problem is that most of the time I get a spinning circle that takes forever to finish spinning. It almost feels like the Philadelphia Inquirer is stuck in the 90’s/00’s. I shouldn’t have to wait so long to read a notification you sent me or just switch to another article from within the app itself. Definitely cancelling my subscription.