Today marked the first official "e-edition" of Detroit's major newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.
Although I had tried it during the weekend with spotty response from the system, I thought I'd give it another try on the first day of the official publication. For the first 20 minutes, I couldn't get a decent connection to the sites... both served by the same system. I presumed this was still part of the "shakedown" cruise.
The URL [site address] indicated "demo.php" which confused me at first, but some digging revealed that the papers had decided to bypass the login pages for a few days so they were making everything public through their "demo" site. Some of the features such as the two-page view would not load for awhile, but eventually came online.
Unlike the weekend when I had the physical paper in front of me, I could not "speed read" anything. I found that a normal 5-minute perusal of the first section had taken me closer to 20-minutes and I was left with the feeling that I really hadn't absorbed nearly as much information. A lot of time was spent trying to figure out if I wanted to bother reading an article because the image and text were small and didn't allow the quick-glance test.
Here's the rub: as a retiree with a lot of time on his hands, I should represent the reader most open to this medium. After all, I do write this stuff that you read online. But there is a difference between a blog post or two and a hundred articles in a graphic facsimile of a newspaper. One gets to the point; one points in too many directions... even if it is "organized."
There is nothing in today's experience that changes my initial impression.
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