The Daily vs. News.me: Battle of the iPad news apps

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch unveiled his Apple-sanctioned, iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, to great fanfare and mixed reviews on Wednesday. (Watch an AP report about the Daily's launch.) Not to be outdone, media rival The New York Times offered a hands-on "first look" at its forthcoming iPad news app, News.me. The Daily is created by a staff of about 100, while News.me automatically gathers news from the reader's Twitter feeds (and those of anyone he follows), plus data from Betaworks' popular bit.ly URL-shortening service. Who will win this "classic battle of humans versus algorithm"?

The Daily blows News.me away: News.me isn't even worthy of being called a response to The Daily, says Damon Brown in BNET. It's more a "glorified newsfeed" than "a truly revolutionary media platform" like Murdoch's iPad paper. Even worse, News.me is essentially a subscription-based rip-off of free iPad app Flipboard. "The Daily is already casting a long shadow, and, at this point, News.me deserves to be eclipsed by it."

"The NYT's News.me: A weak response to News Corp.'s The Daily"

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

News.me does social media better: If you're going to "take on Apple and Rupert Murdoch," says Cody Fink in MacStories, "taking a hard swing into the social field" is actually a good way to go about it. If it works as expected, News.me should show you full, ad-free stories that come recommended by people you choose, rather than just drawn from "the cesspool" of the Twitterverse. We'll see if "the popularity of The New York Times can convince the iPad-savvy" to pay for it.

"News.me to take on The Daily, social reading by article popularity"

If The Daily is the best we can do, journalists are in trouble: The Flipboard model seems a better fit for the iPad than The Daily, says Shane Richmond in The Telegraph. In fact, if The Daily is "the best that journalism's brightest brains can do, given a huge budget and input from Apple itself," then the media needs to look past Murdoch "for its savior." My vote? The Times and News Corp. should both look at the Sky+ app, a "beautiful" iPad reader not "stuck firmly in the print metaphor."

"The Daily iPad app review: A complete failure of imagination"