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News In Brief

There’s no app for fly-swatting

Chau Tu Sep 15, 2010

If there’s ever been an argument for newspaper vs. iPad, it’s this one. Sure, print will always prosper over digital in offering a physical product and that familiar feel of paper, but what about good ole-fashioned fly-swatting? In an ad for its new iPad news application, New York- and New Jersey-based newspaper Newsday puts its reader in a precarious situation.

See the video after the jump:

The commercial shows a man in his kitchen, happily browsing his new Newsday app on his iPad. He has access to cool-looking features like news updates and traffic cameras. But a fly begins to distract him from his enjoyment, and as it lands so conveniently on the counter before him, he instinctively uses the iPad as a fly-swatter — and appropriately, destruction ensues. “The new Newsday iPad app is better than the newspaper in all kinds of ways. Except for one.”

Fly-swatting: print, 1; digital, 0.

But there are many who are still convinced that print will prevail in areas other than fly-swatting. Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal recently spoke to Paris Review editor Lorin Stein about how a literary journal can work in the digital age.

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