The Writers and Photographers Lose – National Geographic Review

Go with the print version if you care about reading National Geographic. Not being able to download the magazine for offline use is a fail. These devs have to know that the target audience of a National Geographic publication would much prefer the magazine’s digital counterpart as opposed to what is essentially a link to the website. I feel really bad for the writers and photographers. Their important and beautiful works will reach less people as more unsubscribe from this absurd change. Furthermore, not every catalogued issue behaves the same. For most older issues, there’s no easy way to access the magazine’s subscriber content. Even if you’re logged in, you only see the magazine articles available to everyone. Within a free article, you have to click a link to the magazine’s date of publish. THEN, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not, you have to sign up/sign in to view the subscriber content...which now contains ads... Not to mention some of the free article’s links aren’t active. By the way, you have to do this each and every time you navigate away from the issue you’re reading. And if you click “Sign In” it redirects you via Safari, or whatever your default browser happens to be. Check out July 2014 for an example of what I’m describing. If you want an example of a digital issue that’s just outright broken, check out September 2015. Can someone tell me how to read the cover story article via the app? Sure those are old issues, but I paid for them, I should have full access in digital format at all times. Another inconsistency are the photographs. Some articles have photos embedded within the article, making for a very pleasing reading experience. Some have all the photos thumbnailed at the top of the article...which is garbage. I’m pretty sure National Geographic hired a group of interns to put this together for free. Again, the real losers here are the writers and photographers. Sorry ladies and gents out there in the field, sometimes risking your health to bring us amazing content, but you’re gonna lose a lot of readers to this “update”. If you want to keep the content online only, you should have made that known as part of the digital description instead of just “reworking” the app so radically. Also, and this is important, anyone who wrote a positive review for this app is working for the dev team. Don’t get tricked. I mean, look at this 5 Star review from Pastorlarry...”A Rarity Among Masses”? Come on, man.
Review by Badmanboom929 on National Geographic.