Your own newspaper every day: the best iPad news apps

I used to subscribe to the Economist, Mac User, The Week, Evo & The Daily Telegraph but I have abandoned them all because the iPad is not just a replacement but a vastly superior news aggregation device. The following apps are my dream team for creating your own highly personalised but broad-scope newspaper and I highly recommend the use of them all:

The Early Edition: the key feature of this app is the fact that its layout mimics that of a classic newspaper. It puts the posts of your feeds into article spaces and makes a multi-page document that you can browse by posts only from today, or from the last collection, or all. As such you can create an "edition" of the news collected from all your feeds for a true overview of what's going on.
The early versions made this seem a bit of a gimmick but now that it has Google Reader integration this is my go-to app. Perhaps the best thing is that it mixes up and prioritises the articles and feeds using some unexplained voodoo but I find this to be very refreshing. I have long had a folder of Top feeds (10 or so) in Google Reader and I found that I often only read these and never dipped into my other 45 feeds which often carried reportage on the same subjects but from blogs/sources that I found to be less pithy much of the time. But that meant that I often missed their angles on stories or those articles that they alone wrote about which you can pick up when skimming headlines in a newspaper format.

Pulse: as advertised by Steve Jobs at his iPhone 4 keynote (which was only days after its first release) this app takes news readers to a new level because it doesn't require the operator to actually find any RSS feeds - it uses a Google style search to route out the feeds available when you simply enter "New York Times" or "Photography". You can then choose either an aggregated 'main news' feed for an overview or perhaps the output of a specialist columnnist from within the search results.
I have found that as a result I browse big news sources like Wired, Ars Technica & BBC via Pulse that would bog a normal RSS reader down with lots of stories that I can't easily skim past but which Pulse's layout makes easy to dip in and out of.

Instapaper: this is a favourite of the tech community but it is superb for anyone wishing to save longer articles for easy reading. At its most basic you navigate to a story that you are interested in and the click the Instapaper link that sits in your bookmarks/favourites bar (or which can be found as an 'open-with' option on most of these other apps). This saves the story's text to Instapaper and strips out all the ads and other guff from the original web page.
As a result 2,000 word articles are saved for hassle-free reading later and formatted beautifully. Explaining it is difficult but do give it a try because it is free.

FT: at the moment this app offers free access to the FT's content care of Hublot, the Swiss watchmaker who is spraying its marketing money around during the World Cup. However, even if the FT requires a moderate subscription I might well be tempted because the layout, the navigation, the updating widgets (market & stock price graphs, your portfolio summary on the front page) and the whole experience makes this the definitive print-brought-to-web newspaper. It is a first class reproduction that maintains the easy browsability of the print edition but embraces the advantages of dynamic content.

Osfoora HD: the quietly excellent Don Mcallister put me onto this via Twitter, appropriately enough, as this is a Twitter client. There are so many flavours of Twitter client that I will simply say that this wins for me because it offers multi-account support; a full range of retweet, draft and other composition tools; comprehensive 'open-with' options & referral so that tweets & links can be expanded or passed onto Facebook, Instapaper and more; and a clean layout that gives ample space to the content but allows quick browsing of hundreds of tweets in your timeline.

Perhaps the key reason to like Twitter is that it surfaces some of the most interesting news & opinions that I read each day: people's links are usually remarkably insightful, intelligent & often funny.

And that is really why I wrote this post: because with these apps, the genius of the editors of the 50+ news sources I can easily read as a result of them, and the passing on of information by my peers I have been able to edit my own daily newspaper. Its scope is both far wider and far deeper than any traditional newspaper could be: I can read up on major world news events or dive right into the technicalities of the newest audio-visual cabling standards. I can browse sports results or correspond in detail on the future of the newspaper pay-wall debate all with equal felicity. The breakfast table is liberated by this wealth of fascinating content - and I can get an updated edition at any time of the day, and many times a day.