Steven Harper Piziks

When Apple announced its new news app, I downloaded it and tried it out. I liked it. Good news conglomerator and it could focus on the kind of news I was interested in.

And then it changed. It added their paid subscriber service and put some of its articles behind a paywall. Then it was half of their articles. Now it's about two-thirds of them.

Also, in the past few months, the opening screen has turned really skimpy on actual news. It starts with a major headline story, followed by three or four paywall stories. Scroll farther, and you get podcasts and audio stories, which I don't want--I'm rarely in a place where I can listen to something, and anyway I'd rather read the news because I read really fast, and listening to news takes longer than I want to spend on it.

After that comes the TRENDING STORIES section, which is dominated by Buzzfeed ("14 Mistakes You're Making In Your Kitchen!!!") and Twitter stories ("Readers react to video of Kevin McCarthy's dog"). Apple has a weird idea of what makes "trending" news.

(As a side issue, I have to ask, when did assembling comments from random Twitter folk become journalism? It definitely isn't, and the more the headline touts how hilarious the tweets are, the less amusing they tend to be.)

The cooking section always links to those sites where a recipe is hidden at the very end of the story. I, and every other foodie, loathe this practice.

And I can't count the number of times a headline shouts "Video of Important Politician Shocks Everyone Everywhere!", only to give you a story that DOESN'T HAVE THE VIDEO IN IT. Not even a LINK to the video. It's always a one-sentence summary of the video, followed by--yep--Twitter reactions.

I've had it. I have a subscription to the Washington Post, and their app has actual news in it. What the hell do I need Apple for? 

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