USA TODAY: US & Breaking News

I can remember seeing my first USA Today newspaper back in the early 80’s when I was a young guy in the Air Force. It was so innovative. We always had a copy in our break room. It was always nice seeing som info from my home state. USA Today has changed. I’m at the point now that I’m thinking I need to part ways. For one, I’m really frustrated with the app. It plays video ads that I can’t stop. It pushes subscriber only articles which I don’t want to see since I’m not a subscriber. It nags me to subscribe. It repeats articles in the grid which wastes my time. The app lose my context and completely reloads when I switch to answer a text message and come back. Secondly, the article editing is pretty bad. I see grammar and punctuation errors frequently. It looks like the writers do their own editing. Thirdly, USA Today has lost its focus on news and has become more of an editorial dispenser. This is not a problem unique to USA Today in 2021. The news media in general has lost its ability to inform and has instead tried to become an influencer, bordering on just straight propaganda. Ironically, I have to work harder at getting to facts in 2021 than I did in 1982. Sorry USA Today, you just aren’t excellent at anything these days. Why should you get my eyeballs?

As a teacher I agreed with many pf the concerns in the article titled “Scores of students are getting F's. What's the point of failing them during COVID-19?” but I feel that there must be an evidence-based method of evaluating student performance which is what grades do. I found the article to be heavily weighted toward assigning blame to schools. Schools must do all they can to help students and families, I think they usually do this. The article mentions s student having 120 no-shows because they were “bored”. Thst can not be an excuse for not participating. The article mentioned students not having internet or devices but the article failed to mention if Kona Lake Schools provided devices. My experience at my school shows that we are giving out devices left and right but still participation continues to be poor sometimes. Grading is not a perfect system but there must be accountability. Without accountability our students will be shortchanged. We all must do more to help failing students. I wish the article did more to address the responsibilities of everyone involved. I know things are very difficult now for many families and I feel very fortunate to be a teacher with reliable employment. Ithe teachers at my school are doing everything we can to help our students. At my school, grading policies and teaching methods have been analyzed and adjusted but nothing replaces an adult actively supervising a student whether in a classroom or at home. Virtual environments make that more difficult to say the least. I fear that excuse-making hurts everyone. I appreciate you addressing the topic.

Number one most frustrating issue: every time you set the phone down or switch apps and come back the story you were reading scrolls back to the top of the article. Super annoying and serves absolutely no purpose. Can’t imagine this would be hard to correct, so please make this stop. I beg you. Second, and this is a compound issue: the main news feed refreshes too often. In the past, the top stories section was just that. Just the most newsworthy stories of the moment. Now, you have packed seemingly every story on the platform all into the top stories section. Well, I could live with that except as I work my way through the never ending list of articles, the app refreshes the feed every so often making me lose my place. To add to the nuisance, all the stories are now in a different order so I can’t really ever get back to where I was. Please pick one or the other: 1) go back to the perfectly logical way you had it before where the top stories were indeed the top stories and I will go into the individual sections for more depth on what I want more of, or 2) turn off the occasional refresh and let me do that whenever I feel the need. It’s fine if it refreshes when you open the app, just not during an active session.