The Atlantic's app is the year's best news product
And it tells us a lot about the state of digital media | The Intersection: #25
Hello! As the year draws to a close, it felt like a good time to revive this too-long-dormant newsletter. Specifically, I want to talk about a single new product, why I love it, and what I think it tells us about the state of digital media going into the next decade.
I’m enamoured with the new app from The Atlantic, which launched about a month ago alongside their gorgeous print redesign. It was the print magazine that caught my eye – I actually bought a copy, at an actual newsagents! And I enjoyed the writing in it so much (along with their excellent UK election coverage) that I subscribed. The app wasn’t even a consideration when I hit buy.
But it should have been! Because even if I didn’t get the print copy, this app would be worth the money by itself. It’s the best news product I’ve used this year, by far. I want to delve into why.
Boot it up, and you’re presented with a “Today” screen. Not a novel concept – we’ve just built the same at Finimize – but executed fantastically here. As Nieman Lab notes, The Atlantic's Today screen is like a native email newsletter. It starts with an explanation of the day’s big theme, and then aggregates articles around that theme (with brief summaries of what they’re about).
You then get some more left-field stuff – yesterday’s issue, for instance, surfaces science experiments from the Vietnam draft, and three bits of trivia about pets. Again, not seminal – many newsletters have a “What We’re Reading” section. But there are two things that make The Atlantic's implementation special. Firstly, the article summaries are informative, interesting, and valuable in and of themselves. That's true of the way all stories are presented, in fact. Seeing as the Today screen isn't paywalled, it means The Atlantic provides a genuinely useful free daily news product.
Even more importantly, the articles are all from The Atlantic's archive. Some of the stories I've seen featured were from the 1800s! I've talked before about the value of news orgs' archives, and it's delightful to see someone taking advantage of that. And because The Atlantic's seemingly uploaded its archives to its current CMS, clicking through to the stories is a frictionless experience: they load in the app, quickly and beautifully, with nothing but a weirdly old dateline to indicate it's archival content.
Combined, you have a near-perfect user experience. The free content is valuable, and makes me want to use the app. It also highlights how much excellent content I'd get access to if I did subscribe. If I didn't already have a subscription, this experience would make me very likely to buy one. It beats any metered paywall or free trial I've used – it's just a more pleasant experience.
The app's also a good microcosm for how far we've come (or not) in the last decade, and what still needs to change in the next. A few things in particular:
We want a sense of completion.
A year after the iPad was announced in 2010, the big journalism news was Murdoch's new digital-only daily newspaper, The Daily. The reaction wasn't good, and it shut down the following year. News consumption turned into an endless feed of stories. Going into 2020, we're back where we started: people do want an end to the stream. They want something curated, and something they're able to finish. The Atlantic app offers just that – a set of stories each day, a prominent placement for the monthly magazine, and the rest of the website content present, but hidden away. The prevalence of newsletters and other edition-style apps is testament to the need for this, but I wonder if the feed of stories is just going be replaced by a feed of newsletters – and we'll look for something else to aggregate all of those together.
Reading's been forgotten.
I was surprised at how struck I was by the app's reading experience. It's just so pleasant – pretty fonts, a design language that tangibly feels like paper, and something I could genuinely read for hours. That shouldn't be that surprising, but it is: it's amazing how poor the reading experience (and, often, the writing!) is in many news apps. Pivots to video and audio have come at the expense of focusing on our core competencies.
We're still not using platforms to their full advantage.
I say that we've focussed too much on video and audio – yet most news organisations are still yet to make the most of those formats. Video's often confined to YouTube or a hokey custom player; audio's locked away in podcast apps. The Atlantic's app is a great example of this: the "Podcasts" category takes you to a page with articles, which then offer a link to iTunes. Why isn't this native? Why don't I have the option to listen to every article with something like Curio (or, better yet, rich audio packages like Finimize)? Why do the animations not work on iOS for The New York Times's big phone-tracking feature?
Although a lot has changed in the past decade... mostly we're exactly where we were. Journalism's business has changed, sure, but I'm not sure that what we make substantially has. The core product we offer readers, listeners, and viewers is more or less the same as ever.
I don't think that will be true in the next decade. As I've said before, I'm bullish on AR smart glasses, and I think it's almost impossible to conceive the form our content will take a decade from now. My hope is that if these past ten years were time the industry spent reacting to technology, the next ten can be time spent harnessing it.
Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week with a roundup of Nieman Lab's 2020 predictions. And maybe some other stuff, too. Have a great weekend, and please share The Intersection with your colleagues if you think they might enjoy it.