CNN: Live & Breaking News 12+

I am so displeased with this latest version of the CNN App! The developers have totally stripped away the control and flexibility the user once had. I used to be able to Go Live, click on Schedule and select a show to watch which had previously aired that day. I LOVED that feature and now it’s gone! If for example I missed the airing of The Situation Room which airs at 2:00 pm PST here in Cali, no worries. I knew that I could watch the full show, in its entirety anytime later that same day. I could click to watch any show that had already aired by Judy clicking on it. Now I can no longer watch a show that I missed...How could the developers remove this important feature?!

This app is now just a ho-hum app. It is boring and does not offer anything meaningful to the user. I used to watch CNN faithfully on the older app version because it meant so much to me. In my opinion it was the BEST news app out there. Now there is no reason for me to use it. Truly disappointing!

This CNN app was much better prior to it’s major makeover that occurred a few months ago, which has too many disjunct sections mixed with unrelated sections of articles & underscored ads. -It’s hard to know which articles are news and which are ads disguised to be news. Also, lots of articles aren’t being removed daily, making it feel like we’re reading days old topics. Please switch back to the way CNN’s app used to be where readers could scroll down and know distinctly each section had related topics and were current. It was closer to scrolling down on Facebook with being able to see today’s headline stories. This new version is a mess. It’s confusing, frustrating and wants readers to weed through the massive amount of junk on the “Top News” page because it’s wants everything to be newsworthy. It’s makes the reader have to work to filter through garbage just to get one or two real current headline stories. Remove the advertisement stories posed as newsworthy headlines. Stop with postings of any and everything on that page in particular as it takes away from what’s really news and what’s just advertisements which has created a lack of credibility of what you’re feeding your audience. Please go back to the old app’s version where top news page was primarily today’s headline stories and the ads were more distinct so readers could clearly avoid clicking on them.

I think the CNN app was pretty good for general major news stories. With some UI changes it did begin to get more cluttered, but nothing overwhelming. Then many of the news stories started requiring a subscription to read or even look at the background of a topic they were referring to. Also I think reorganizing some of the topics would be necessary. As a tech person, I absolutely don’t care about CNN’s take on various new products. I’ll go to one of the many dedicated sites that specialize in that, provide benchmarks, etc. Not some young kids quick take on what they thought was “neat” in a product. Again all these were annoyances but no reason to completely stop using it.

Now they introduced subscription required for everything. Now that’s a joke. CNN is the vanilla news equivalent, don’t expect anything super in-depth but a general overview. There are so many other unbiased (not saying that CNN is, they seem rather neutral), that provide higher quality news reporting for free.

I think CNN overestimated itself as a news outlet. They are good for high level overviews of major stories. Every flavor of monetization of their coverage has failed in the past you would think they would learn by now.