Tennessean: News & eNewspaper

I guess you can call me old fashioned but I still look forward to my Tennessean in both hard copy and online. When there is a big story breaking, the Tennessean online is the first copy I look for. You can bet I will follow it the rest of the day. Then the next morning I still want my morning paper at my door so I can start my day with the latest news. The Tennessean has some real professionals starting with David Plazas. I always enjoy reading articles by Dave Boucher, Getahn Ward, Ms Cheap, and others.

I activated the Tennessean widget on my iPhone as soon as it was offered. It NEVER opens. The widget always says “Unable to Load.” When I go to the Tennessean app, it takes forever to load, and when it finally does and I click on a story, the app crashes. This is not a situation caused by increase demand on broadband or the app because of Covid-19. This has been going on since the widget and app were offered, long before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19. Also, I have no trouble with any other widgets or apps, so everyone else seems to be doing fine. I stopped my subscription to the Tennessean because there are few new stories every day, only a repeat of old stories with maybe one line of new information, then the old story is repeated as if it was new information. That is an old, well-known trick in the industry. As a result, I find the Tennessean widget, the Tennessean app and the Tennessean, itself, to be utterly worthless. It’s a shame, too, because I subscribed to the Tennessean to support local journalism, which I know to be vital to our society. Perhaps, only when people like me start leaving will the Tennessean start operating the way it is supposed to. When I was a newspaper reporter, we were required to submit two new stories every day. If we submitted a repeat of a story we had already written with only a couple of new sentences at the top, we would have been fired. I am certain that the Tennessean could offer numerous viable excuses for why it is not able to live up to the journalistic standards that were established long ago. However, it is their responsibility to find solutions to overcome those obstacles. Papers of record have always had obstacles to overcome that were unique to their era. You just do it. Just look at all these reviews that basically say the same thing.

Moved here recently from Dallas and used their app for almost a decade. I understand what a good-reading experience should be like. This app is frustrating. As soon as my subscription expires I will stop using it. 1- Web 1.0 user interface (buttons verses swiping through). Scanned-in articles… tragically old experience. Oh, looks nothing like the screenshots posted in the App-store! 2- Grainy images that are obviously scanned in at low DPI, and can’t be enhanced. 3- So many bugs, you can’t get through a single edition without it hanging. Sometimes displaying a blank screen. Other times, stupid buttons don’t work leaving you stuck on a page. I actually called support (was sent a reset password email as their solution). 4- Adds. One would think if you paid for something there would be less adds. No, there are pop-up and in-article adds in addition to the newspaper adds.