Why Can’t I Read a Newspaper On My Phone!?

What’s that? Everyone reads Newspapers on mobile devices now? No. We read articles. We are missing out on a more Newspaper-like experience.

If Amazon suddenly announced that all Kindles would no longer store the files for entire books on their hard drives… If they announced that instead readers would download books one page at a time or even one chapter at a time from the cloud, people would think they were bonkers.

Readers would start to freak out. And if Amazon then further announced that on Kindle e-books there would be ads in between each page or between each paragraph, readers would riot. Probably. Or worse, they would start perhaps buying paper books again.

Yet we accept the equivalent of just that kind of deep and destructive limitation to reading when we read just about every other informative format of text online.

Most of us get most of our news one paragraph or column at a time. At the most, we get one story at a time. This loss of flexibility and immediacy in the way we do our informative reading has unfolded slowly over the last 10 to 15 years. Sure, we have more immediate options of what stories to read. But our decreased technological agility at navigating news is a dangerous thing.

Of course, anyone would admit that the unit of prose is not a paragraph, a page, or a chapter: It is is an entire book. Likewise:

The unit of news should not be an article.

The unit of news should be an entire newspaper.

Or a full magazine. At least. Or perhaps the real experiential unit of journalism should be the several periodicals that you have sitting on your table all at once folded open to important pages. Allowing you to revisit important paragraphs and sentences. A collection of texts that allow you to cross check and compare facts and ideas among a number of sources.

We have lost this concept with the predominance of online news. It is a tragedy that the functional unit of journalism has largely been reduced to the article.

I realized this last night after attending a talk yesterday on the future of ebooks for Library science at UC Berkeley. As it happens I am going to get the New York Times Sunday paper tomorrow. Waking up in the middle of the night as I often do, I started browsing my iPhone news app (which teases me with a menu of single article titles from Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, International Times, Vice, etc. Much as everyone’s Facebook and Twitter Feeds and reader apps do on a daily even minute to minute basis). Bewildered by the array of jazzy headlines, not knowing in which to invest my next 5 seconds waiting for the download, it occurred to me:

In fact, downloading article by article is an experience that is orders of magnitude less informative and less interactive than reading the entire newspaper was!

Online reading of News articles goes basically like this:

(A) Peruse a list of partial and dececeptively trumped up titles.

(B) Wait a (rather excruciating) moment to access the requested article. Often interspersed (tortuously) with ads in front of the text or among the paragraphs.

(C) If I manage to finish the whole article (unlikely), I then have to go back through the very same cascading menu from (A) all over again to choose something new. It’s so awfully and miserably linear! So very contrary to the philosophy of the “Web” itself!

(D) Worst of all though, if I leave the page and want to see it again — if I can even remember wanting to see it again — I have to commence again at (A) or something like it. Then find my way all the way down to the passage I want to review!

This is how virtually all online newspaper and news clients or apps deliver news to us. But this is absolutely nothing like the way I am going to read the Sunday paper tomorrow!

Compared to consuming an entire real-life newspaper or magazine, reading online is like getting a glass of water fed to you with a medicine dropper.

When I read a newspaper I want to take the whole glass in my hand and sip or gulp as I like. I want to tear the text apart and chew it up as I like. I want to digest it and absorb it at the speed and in the order I choose. I want to change my mind and not be penalized by returning to repetitive and tedious menus. Sure, the NYT allows users to browse a PDF-like version of “Today’s Paper” through their app. But this is almost worse than flipping through a digital microfiche. That’s a pretty weak compromise that just combines the worst of the print and online reading worlds.

I want to practice the art of irregular reading on my phone. Just like I do when I read a newspaper or when I skim a non-fiction book.

By this I basically mean two things:

A) I want random access that can simulate opening to just any page in a newspaper section to see what is there.

B) I want to browse among a number of different articles by instinct, skip around and return to articles in mid-paragraph. And I do not want to be penalized with waiting for data to load.

I want to be able to interrupt myself to look at something else, and then revisit or discuss with other readers nearby something interesting I saw, immediately, with the text in front of me.In less than a moment, to be able to flip back to a paragraph or a passage where I was reading earlier from any article easily and without friction. And I want to do that as many damn times as I want! To really shop around and make the most of my reading time, I need to be able to read parts of articles, any part I may choose, and then go on to any number of other articles before returning quickly to pieces I read before or to finish unread portions of other articles.

In other words, I don’t want to have to commit to reading an article just to look into a few of the paragraphs that constitute the article.I want to do these kinds of irregular things without friction. Without waiting. Without interruption.

If we cannot read irregularly when we read online, then our awareness of the world, our ability to discourse with one another is being downgraded severely and dangerously.

I am not saying it is easy to do the equivalent kinds of things with e-books. Yet, there has been a whole lot more work on mechanisms that make this kind of thing possible with books than with news. It’s still bad. But it is not as bad as what has happened with informative text. And that is kind of wierd.

My point is, though, that like with an e-book, getting the equivalent of a newspaper experience on your phone — or anything close to it, or dare I say better than it — requires that you get all of the content of a newspaper as soon as you begin to read. (Or why not an entire bundle of newspapers!)

The news should all be downloaded to your phone where they stay and remain available as long as you want. There is no real technological boundary to this.

Just like with an e-book, getting the equivalent of a newspaper experience on your phone — or anything close to it, or dare I say better than it — requires that you get all of the content of a newspaper. (Or why not a bundle of newspapers!) downloaded to your phone where they stay and remain available as long as you want.

The fact is that we are all thirsty. We are ready to read. Utterly parched for News and informative content — for all manner of short form factual content, really, it doesn’t have to be new… The same could be said for connected articles on Wikipedia, and other online educational texts. All web pages could be made easier to browse and bookmark to facilitate irregular reading too.

But the worst thing about online reading today holds especially for online journalism — including Medium and Wordpress sites — which is what people read the most.

Facebook and Twitter have exacerbated this restriction in the speed of informative text.

After all, we could hold all of last year’s New York Times papers on an insignificant fraction of the hard drives of most smartphones.

Hell, if I want to read and compare what the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Guardian, Financial Times, and L.A. Times all said about any particular topic in a single day, if I want to compare their front pages, if I want to compare what is on the front of their sports pages, I should be able to do that on my phone! I could do all these things in a row without having to download a single file. It could all be there. Everyday.

But it is not. Why?

Part of it is because text-based media has monetized on the web by communicating with a series of ad companies who have to be contacted with every navigational in order to better target readers with “impressions” of advertisements.

Part of it is because developers just have not been imaginative enough. Part of it is because readers have gotten lazy.

Here is a quick wishlist for what could make reading the news online a whole lot better:

a) Dynamic menus

b) cross publication aggregation

c) historical aggregation of specific stories across publications

d) download multiple results of a keyword search across publications to browse irregularly with your session and highlights saved locally.

e) social bookmarking highlighting and annotation of entire publications

f) new methods of random access and non-linear skimming that cooperate with keyword searches

To do these things would require having the whole newspaper there on your device and making it browsable in a way that is competitive with a broadsheet newspaper. The dynamic menus that could allow us to surf the News like we were supposed to be able to surf the web are in the basic UX toolkit of most programmers.

Incidentally, an online news service that could actually deliver the experience of reading entire newspapers irregularly and out of order would actually be an online news service worth paying for! (Unlike anything we have today.)

Perhaps there is no reason it couldn’t be free. Perhaps there is no reason developers couldn’t whip up a system that would allow full bundles of plain text news to be shared out on a day to day basis. Publishers might call that piracy. I would just say it would be required for any informed citizen.

The closest we’ve gotten is downloadable e-book versions of newspapers and magazines. So you can read the New Yorker on your Kindle. That’s not good enough.

It’s time developers work out an E-Newspaper format and a venue for it that will really allow us to access a full newspaper’s worth of text on our phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. On our laptops and desktops too, if we want!

Maybe the reason that Delicious, Pinboard, Pocket, Instapaper, hypothes.is and other attempts to advance our ability to socially bookmark and annotate online information never really changed the way we read significantly — compared with, say, Facebook or Twitter — is because we do not access entire issues of online content that we can put to the crucial purposes of annotation for the sake of our friends and followers.

Online readers and potential online annotators haven’t been working with the appropriate unit of content at their immediate disposal: Full periodical issues not just single articles.

If we had a bigger swath of articles to browse, there would be a reason for developing new ways of pointing each other to the specific passages, concepts, and information that we want other to question, care about, and understand along with us.

That is, if we were able to fix the way that online newspapers and magazines supply content to social media, maybe social media would fulfill its promise of acting as a “Town Hall” means of bringing people together to talk about and discuss real issues instead of just chattering, brand-mongering, and political grand-standing.

Technology should be speeding up the information. Not slowing it down.