Browsing through all the local newspapers listed in the PressReader app on my iPad, I was impressed by the remaining practitioners of this 19-century technology. Want to see non-stock-photo images of the drought in the Midwest? With PressReader, you can thumb through Tribune Star’s (“serving Terre Haute and the Wabash Valley) excellent photo coverage.
The folks at PressReader–technically NewspaperDirect–pinged us last week to let us know about their app– mostly in the context of using it as a travel aid. And PressReader does make sense for tourists who want to stay in touch with favorite news sources, as well as sampling international wares.
But for those of us who are staying put, PressReader is a useful reminder that local coverage based on something called reporters is still powerful in the age of Huffington Post and their pool of rewriters and opinionaters
So what’s the app like? PressReader presents an image of the actual newsprint, which in the case of many papers includes a front-page with bold archaic Gothic fonts and 18th-century iconography involving ships and suns. The newspaper image has been digitized and webified so that when you can click on a headline, the app takes you to an iPad friendly presentation of the article. In other words, you can swipe your way through the pages of the story.
As an aggregator, PressReader also lets you assemble a library of broadsheets and tabloids. There’s a keyword search tool to find your favorite bits. Other digital-age magic includes a translation tool and a text-to-speech reader.
To amuse myself, I gave PressReader an article from Le Monde about the London Olympics. As I have noticed before, translators have problems with idioms, so “les athletes tricolores” became “light athletes”, instead of being rendered as something like French athletes.
I decided to spare myself having to listen to the automated reader.
For many small or regional newspapers with limited or, perhaps, no web presence, PressReader (and other services like it) provides an alternative approach to distributing their content, while still keeping the essence of the paper intact. Presumably these newspapers get a cut of PressReader’s download fee–which is $.99 per issue. Or maybe it’s a flat fee.
Whatever.
Any revenue these papers get at this point can be the difference between muddling through another day or closing shop entirely.
PressReader is available on Android and Blackberry, as well as IOS devices. You have access to over 2,000 news sources. Subscription plans are available.