Monday, March 30, 2009

Reader reviews first day of "digital only" Detroit Free Press

Excerpt from the review:

10:05 a.m.: Go to freep.com. Look for where paid subscribers log on to get the spiffy new e-edition, but can't find it. Click on something that says "E-edition How-To," and wait through a download of 8.46 Mbytes. It's an instructional guide on how to navigate the e-edition, but still no log-on instructions.

10:16 a.m.: See, in tiny type on top bar of freep.com, something that says "e-edition." Click on that. It's the e-edition, all right, and it looks like I've got in without logging on. Could this be a first-day only thing? I want to set up a user name and password as a paid subscriber so I have no problem logging in tomorrow. I click on "my account" and get this message: " Sorry, Account is only available when logins are enabled and you are logged in."

I decide to ignore the log-in process for now and check out how this thing looks. The full graphical layout of any page is on the left; you click on a story and it appears to the right. You select pages via a drop-down menu. You can bump up the text size on any story (nice!). . . .

Summary: I've been initiated into the brave new world of digital-only daily newspaper delivery. There will be readjustments, for sure. But the Free Press gets props for blazing a trail, and being brave enough to know it'll learn painful lessons along the way—lessons that other daily newspapers will benefit from. Because whether it's next month or next year, your daily, local newspaper may be next.

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