I can remember seeing my first USA Today newspaper back in the early 80’s when I was a young guy in the Air Force. It was so innovative. We always had a copy in our break room. It was always nice seeing som info from my home state. USA Today has changed.I’m at the point now that I’m thinking I need to part ways. For one, I’m really frustrated with the app. It plays video ads that I can’t stop. It pushes subscriber only articles which I don’t want to see since I’m not a subscriber. It nags me to subscribe. It repeats articles in the grid which wastes my time. The app lose my context and completely reloads when I switch to answer a text message and come back. Secondly, the article editing is pretty bad. I see grammar and punctuation errors frequently. It looks like the writers do their own editing. Thirdly, USA Today has lost its focus on news and has become more of an editorial dispenser. This is not a problem unique to USA Today in 2021. The news media in general has lost its ability to inform and has instead tried to become an influencer, bordering on just straight propaganda. Ironically, I have to work harder at getting to facts in 2021 than I did in 1982. Sorry USA Today, you just aren’t excellent at anything these days. Why should you get my eyeballs?

Number one most frustrating issue: every time you set the phone down or switch apps and come back the story you were reading scrolls back to the top of the article. Super annoying and serves absolutely no purpose. Can’t imagine this would be hard to correct, so please make this stop. I beg you. Second, and this is a compound issue: the main news feed refreshes too often. In the past, the top stories section was just that. Just the most newsworthy stories of the moment. Now, you have packed seemingly every story on the platform all into the top stories section. Well, I could live with that except as I work my way through the never ending list of articles, the app refreshes the feed every so often making me lose my place. To add to the nuisance, all the stories are now in a different order so I can’t really ever get back to where I was. Please pick one or the other: 1) go back to the perfectly logical way you had it before where the top stories were indeed the top stories and I will go into the individual sections for more depth on what I want more of, or 2) turn off the occasional refresh and let me do that whenever I feel the need. It’s fine if it refreshes when you open the app, just not during an active session.

Update May 22– why in the world can’t they fix the bugs in this app? We are paying for premium ad-free, yet frequently I,m blocked from reading a story because “the content is for subscribers”. I then check my account- yes the subscription is acknowledged— so why is the display not working correctly? I’ve been using this app for years and generally satisfied. Less satisfied this year with stale content that lingers for days, weeks, month. Then came the implementation of paid subscriptions. I don’t have a problem with that decision— gotta pay the bills and the newspaper business in general is suffering as the public migrates away from wanting to read newspapers. (Very sad) I did sign up for a premium subscription earlier this summer when it was introduced - despite the annoying video ads smack in the middle of articled. Now my subscription doesn’t work thru itunes —Apple shows it as still being valid on monthly renewal, but even though I go to settings and click on restore purchase, the app will not acknowledge it and I have no premium content. Folks, this is incompetence. Get it together! I’m not going to pay you to not function.

Really trying hard to push their paywall on users. Seems like over half of its content is for “subscribers only” these days. Never used to be like that. If you’re going to create content exclusively for subscribers it should only be that that is not relevant news to the average consumer. I find it ridiculous that there is even one piece of news blocked pertaining to COVID-19. Crazy but USA Today has put COVID articles behind its paywall. You would think regardless of the contents, COVID articles, should be available to EVERYONE. American corporate greed shining through hard. I do not use any social media because I believe it has been the stagnant slow death of the world. Literally useless. People who don’t receive their “news” from social media should have FREE access to whatever is considered news these days. I would hardly pay a dollar for the subscribers only content per year let alone 50 dollars plus for a year. Absolutely insane. Who knew in 2021 you would have to “struggle” to obtain relevant news without paying. Do better USA Today. I used to love this app. Now I despise every time I have to scroll through multiple subscribers only articles to reach access to free ones. Get a clue and separate the subscribers content elsewhere. Don’t waste non-subscribers time.