Wall Street Journal

Written by Guest Contributor: David Trotz (@dtrotzjr)

When the iPad was first announced by Apple they showcased a few apps to show off what the iPad was capable of. One of those apps was a news app “The Wall Street Journal”. It was obvious that the struggling print news media was hopeful that the iPad would save their struggling industry.

When I received my iPad last weekend one of the first apps I downloaded was The Wall Street Journal, which I will be referring to as the WSJ in this article. The demo given at the iPad announcement convinced me that they might have something worth trying out. The download was free but to gain access to any of the premium content you have to subscribe to the iPad edition of the paper which runs $17.99 a month.

Despite the high subscription rate I decided to try out the service as I was eager to see this app in action, and since the WSJ has a 100% satisfaction guarantee or they refund you the remainder of your subscription I felt it was worth a try.

Signing up was frustrating. The interface was not iPad friendly, there were several times where I accidentally submitted my incomplete subscription sign-up because the “Return” button would submit the form rather than navigating to the next field. Once I had signed up it showed a confirmation screen which included confirmation of what I can only assume was a test account showing a payment of $70 was made. This had me a bit freaked out until I noticed that the email was not mine and the last four digits on the card charged was not my card. Obviously we are not off to a good start here, but I continued on anyway hoping the experience would get better, after all it is the WSJ.

Once signed up and logged in you gain access to all the premium content of the paper immediately. The app gives you access to the paper as it was printed for the past week as well as the paper as it was generated just “Now”.

This “Now” feature is what impresses me the most because they take the headlines at that moment in time and coalesce them into today’s featured articles seamlessly. I must admit this is very well done and it is where I spend most of my time in the app. There is a catch however, you have to wait for what seems like an eternity for the app to generate the “Now” paper which wouldn’t be so bad except you get no feedback while it is doing this, and thus you have no idea how much longer to wait. If you have used this app you might say that there is feedback, there is an orange progress bar under the paper as it generates the content. That’s all well and good except most of the time the progress bar means nothing, it will get to 100% then when you tap the paper it does nothing. You have to wait another 2-3 minutes for the paper to finish generating (with no feedback) and for the orange bar to disappear before you can go into the paper. I found this extremely frustrating.

Once inside the paper the app really begins to shine. The paper is laid out like a real newspaper, down to the font used and the edges of the paper are a darker brown like real paper would be. Navigating the newspaper takes some getting used to because various swipes do different things depending on where you are at in the paper. The content is well written as would be expected from a professional organization like the WSJ, and is definitely a step above AP News or Reuters.

I was surprised to find that there are pop-up ads in the paper that appear from the bottom of the page whenever you navigate from one page to another and at seemingly random times there are full page ads as well. This surprised me because most apps in the app store have ads for free apps and then allow you to pay to remove the ads, but in this app I am paying a premium price and yet I still get ads. I do realize that if you paid for the WSJ to be delivered to your door you would get a newspaper full of ads as well, but this medium is different and I think the folks at WSJ need to rethink their strategy because $17.99/mo is quite expensive and then to get ads on top of that is almost insulting.

Remember earlier I mentioned that the WSJ offers a refund for the remainder of a subscription when canceling? Well I decided to take them up on that offer and cancel. The only way to cancel is to call a phone number which I found somewhat annoying because I knew they would counter offer me a better deal to keep the service. Regardless I called to cancel and within three minutes I had successfully cancelled my subscription and the charges reversed on my credit card. No questions asked, no counter offers made. I must say this was the best part of my experience with The Wall Street Journal.

Overall I found my experience with the app frustrating. I feel that if they could address the loading issues with the “Now” feature and considerably lower the overall cost of the subscription I might be interested in trying it again. I imagine that the Wall Street Journal will have loyal fans who keep the paper afloat but if the paper wants to reinvent itself they need to rethink their approach here.