Free iPad news alternatives to The Daily (screenshots)
Will readers pay 99 cents a day, or $40 a year, for The Daily? This list of the best sites for reading news on the iPad offers some free alternatives.
Dan Ackerman
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
"Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Now part of the larger Business Insider family of sites, SAI often has good leaks and scoops on tech news, from a rare New York perspective. Over time, it's started to rely more on traffic-pumping stunts, but it's still a good read.
Say what you will about some of its kookier obsessions, this is still a great zeitgeist barometer and a good place to find links to not-the-usual-suspects news sources. Plain text formatting is great for the iPad, and on a good day it latches onto big stories before many others.
Another case of a publication's basic Web site being better than its dedicated iPad app. The front page is too crammed with tiny links, but once inside, the Times' articles present themselves very nicely on the iPad (once you do a quick pinch-to-zoom), and the paper's real-time blog of updates from Egypt has been one of the best outlets for breaking news from there.
The New York Times plans to hide behind a pay wall sometime in 2011 (and not for the first time). It remains to be seen if the company will be able to come up with a workable plan, especially now that The Daily has capped itself at $40 for a year's subscription.
This sometimes stodgy (but still excellent) magazine has really come alive online of late, and feels like the perfect iPad read to me. There are repurposed articles from the print edition, but the real draw is the daily blog-style updates from a regular team of name-brand journalists. Jeffrey Goldberg, in particular, should be required reading for anyone interested in world events. This is probably my single most satisfying iPad news experience.
Another site that reads well on the iPad, once you do a quick pinch-zoom onto the single column of text in a typical article. It's become part of the national conversation, and a must-read for those concerned with the mechanics of government.
Not as sharp as it used to be, and increasingly adept at burying the links to sources it pulls from, Newser's icon-filled home page is still exponentially easier to navigate than The Daily.
Another print mag that translates surprisingly well to both the Web and the iPad. Ignore the overly fussy iPad app and just scroll through the regular Vanity Fair Web site, which is anchored by the excellent VF Daily blog.
A must-read for those into the film and TV industry, this infamously hard-hitting blog has taken on trade magazine competitors with very long histories, and typically beats them at their own game. Another case of simple formatting and navigation making a publication ideal for iPad reading.
