AOL’s personalized news reader for the iPad, Editions, is intended to give people a daily news briefing.IPad owners have plenty of options for reading online news in one place. Flipboard, Pulse and Zite all pull articles from a variety of publications into a personalized digital magazine.
You can now add another to the list — AOL. On Wednesday, it introduced Editions, a free news reader for iPad that gets its inspiration — oddly — from the print world.
The retro feel starts with the Editions logo, which recalls a Sunset magazine, replete with faux mailing label on the front page. It continues with the leisurely pace at which new articles are added — daily — rather than the second-by-second stream that has come to define the Internet era.
The concept for Editions is a daily briefing that lets people get up to speed on what they need to know, said David Temkin, who leads AOL’s mobile team. Algorithms help tailor the articles that appear to individual tastes.
Updating Editions daily with new articles instead of around the clock is done deliberately, Mr. Temkin said. Otherwise, the quantity would be too overwhelming for most people to follow.
“For a lot of people, it becomes oppressive,” Mr. Temkin said. “This is not tapping you on the shoulder all the time.”
Users can choose the publications, news categories and people to emphasize in the magazine. The technology also skews the articles that appear based on those that the user clicked
on in the past.
Articles are drawn from AOL’s content sites like Patch, the local news service, and the Huffington Post, along with more than 1,000 other publications that are available free online. An automated system determines how prominently to display articles based on their placement in the original publication, among other factors.
Editions shows full versions of AOL content, but only excerpts of articles from other publications along with links back to the original source.
Excluding posts from social media sites was another strategy. Flipboard, in particular, is known for including feeds from Twitter along with professionally written news articles. But such posts do not necessarily contain news and fall outside the “daily briefing” theme that Editions is trying to maintain, Mr. Temkin said.
Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, is trying to remake the company while its legacy online access business erodes. His plan is to focus on online content and, as his rivals are doing, make inroads on mobile devices.
Editions does not include ads at the outset, but will do so eventually, Mr. Temkin said. There are no plans to sell subscriptions to a library of news like Scribd, which is planning to introduce a Netflix-style subscription service later this year.