USA TODAY: US & Breaking News 12+

I have enjoyed reading the news on the USA Today app for years. Recently the experience changed when some content was blocked and available only to subscribers. I’m sympathetic to the challenges faced by the print media and decided to go with a digital subscription especially since I like USA Today so much. That’s where the frustration started. Once I paid for my subscription naturally I expected to no longer have access blocked as only being available to subscribers but sure enough that is exactly what happened no matter what I did. Even after signing in. Since it was the weekend I only had the chat option for customer support and their suggestion was to call customer support on Monday. So I called customer support on Monday and they told me the same thing - can’t find my account, despite me having a receipt from Apple proving I paid for my digital subscription 48 hours. Their suggestion? Call back in 24 hours! Not sure how that’s going to help. The lack of helpful customer service (precipitated by the lack of a seamless process in 2021 to recognize when a reader has converted to a paid subscriber) holds me back from being able to rate higher than average. Please help!

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.