News apps for the iPhone that just don't quit

Posted by Kathleen_McCoy

Posted: November 3, 2009 - 7:19 pm

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I'm taking a class at the university about societal change. It's taught in the business school and a chief aim is for marketers to stay on top of change so they can keep selling products to an ever-morphing audience.

The universe is divided into spheres -- the infosphere, the sociosphere, the psychosphere, the technosphere, the bio/power-sphere.

My group project was on the infosphere and how radically it's changing. No news there -- look at your Good Morning Newspaper as it struggles with staff cutbacks and leveraged ambitions.

But that's not the subject of this blog post. Instead, let me tell you about a connection I share with the professor, Edward Forrest, over iPhone apps that deliver news.

He's the one who pointed out newsy.com, a Web site that offers 2-3 minute videos wrapping up reports from major national and international news sources.

The next week, he pulled out his iPhone and started showing some amazing news apps. Here's a few:

NewsAddict
NewsAddict: The app icon, newspapers in a rack.

What I wish I could show you is what pops up on my iPhone with this app: 41 colorful buttons representing all top news sites maximized for the iPhone.

USA Today
The New York Times
Digg
CNN
ESPN
ABC News
Fox News
Yahoo News
Time
The Wall Street Journal
Los Angeles Times
Chicago Tribune
The Washington Post
MSNBC
CBS News
NPR
AP
Google News
The Economist
Business Week
CNET
Houston Chronical
Washington Post
Dallas Morning News
Austin American Statesman
Newsday

That's not everybody, but it's sure a lot. They load fast and its easy to check coverage. All that, for 99 cents. How can anyone compete?

Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist Daily
This app is a newsreader that ties into four aggregators: Google, Reddit, Digg, Yahoo, with story topic selections like health, technology, popular, top headlines. An example off the DIGG-All stories site -- "Researchers dig into the dreams of college students." OK, so women dream about shopping more than men do. Not really news. But what is cool about this site is the headlines appear in a brightly colored box. The bigger the box, the more popular the article. The darker the box, the older the article is. The visual representation of news is wild. Zen News is another that shows news visually. Single words -- more like story topics than news stories -- appear in bubbles across a global map, again the size of the bubble indicating level of reader interest in the topic.

"Stocks" was the biggest bubble at 9:30 Tuesday night under the filter "What's hot." Select that bubble and "gold" pops up. Hit that bubble and you move immediately to an LA Times story reportedly filed a minute earlier, with a headline "Stocks end mostly higher as gold jumps to new record."

One more, Instapaper
Instapaper: Instapaper icon.
This app essentially let's you select articles on the Web to read later on your iPhone. You install a little 'read later' widget on your computer toolbar, then as you cruise and see an article you want, hit your 'read more' widget, drop in the URL, maybe a title and description if you like. You can even load up your favorite blog urls so you have your favorite reading material at your fingertips. Later, in line at the bank or waiting anywhere, pull that list up and start reading from your iPhone. I pulled in the News Desk blog from The New Yorker magazine, and a few seconds later, I could read it on my iPhone.

Something this class is driving home is the pressure for everything to be free, or as close to free as you can get. These apps were free to maybe 99 cents or $1.99.

The economics are mind-boggling. The disruption is intense, but the opportunities are enormous. Who would have guessed three years ago that a mobile device could deliver so much news to read, so fast.

But it's not perfect. It's mostly not local; nothing trumps local. I have no doubt that's coming next.

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