Richmond Times-Dispatch

I’ve been a news subscriber to the RTD for more than 30 years, and reluctantly migrated to the digital version. To my surprise, I’ve come to love reading the paper on my iPad. But I find the app clunky and the digital version comes across as an after thought. -Typically the articles are riddled with typos, misplaced hyphens, and out of place content. I’ve written the editor, who essentially replied, “oh well.” They are desperately in need of a proofreader. -Every night it ask me to subscribe to the news plus version three times before it will let me read the paper. - Content is not formatted for digital viewing. For example, If it appears black and white in the paper, it will be black and white in the digital version too. If it appears on a two page spread in the paper, it will show up on two different pages in the app, no ability to view and scroll. -It lacks any ability to read or share comments. I also subscribe to the NYT online, and that’s my favorite feature. In short, this app is better than nothing. But there’s lots of room for improvement. Digital is the future. It’s time Lee invests in this app.

The app is pretty much a porting of the RTD website to a local app. The layout is very poor and, like the website, finding the articles between the advertisements is sometimes a challenge. Overall, I’m not impressed and would rather view the RTD web over the app. The only saving grace is that you can get notifications of breaking stories. But you can get the same by setting up RSS on the RTD website. A few things that would greatly improve the app... 1) add the ability to link subscription to the app which reduces the number of distracting advertisements. (This would also be needed for #3.) 2) review the design of the GUI on smaller screens, it seems the development team either doesn’t understand the iOS system or didn’t bother to test on different sized screens. 3) add e-edition viewer directly to the app instead of porting the web version and along with this, allow automatic downloading of the e-edition to the device.

On a laptop the site works well. If you’re a paid subscriber and access it via the email links you still have to login, hence a 3 rating as it works but not great. Clearly the RTD organization is attempting to embrace the digital age, but have not learned to listen to and make digital functional improvements. It will be interesting to see if they can do it in time to survive.