Chicago Tribune

Review by eFreeware

Most news apps try to cover everything, everywhere. The Chicago Tribune app does something narrower and, for the right reader, more useful: it puts one newsroom's output on Chicago news, politics, sports, business and entertainment, and lets you decide which of those threads you actually follow. That focus is the most distinctive thing about it, and it shapes everything else, from the personalized feed to the team-by-team sports coverage.

This is built for people with a real stake in Chicago. If you follow the Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox or Blackhawks, or you want to know what is happening at City Hall and in the city's restaurants and bars, the app is organized around exactly those interests. Readers with no connection to the area will find the scope too tight to be worth the space on their phone.

It is a free download with ads, and the developer also offers in-app purchases. The app has more than 100,000 installs and a 2.6 average from 1,882 ratings, a score low enough that I would go in with measured expectations rather than assuming the experience matches the quality of the journalism.

Building a feed that reflects your interests

The core of the app is a feed you assemble yourself. Rather than scrolling a single fixed front page, you select the topics that interest you and the app arranges coverage around those choices. The developer describes a One-Tap Following system for this, which suggests the intent is speed: tap what you care about and the feed adjusts, rather than sending you through a long setup process.

What appeals to me about that approach is how it handles a reader with uneven interests. Someone who wants politics and business but has no patience for celebrity coverage can weight the feed accordingly. Someone else might want almost nothing but sports and the dining and nightlife coverage, which the app treats as a subject in its own right rather than an afterthought.

Personalized feeds live or die on how well they respond when your interests shift. The topic selection model at least gives you direct control over the inputs, which is more than you get from an app that guesses. For a reader who knows what they want from a Chicago news source, that control is the main draw.

Following the teams and the city after hours

Sports gets its own treatment. For a city with this many teams and this many loyalties, following them one at a time is the sensible arrangement.

The app also covers the dining and nightlife side of Chicago, which the developer frames as an ever-changing scene. That gives the feed a second life beyond hard news, and it is the sort of coverage that benefits from being pulled together in one place rather than hunted down across separate sites.

Beyond text, there are videos and photo galleries the developer describes as exclusive, and stories, photos and videos can be saved for when you have time to sit with them. Saving is the feature I would lean on most: it turns a breaking-news app into something you can also read at your own pace.

Alerts, sharing and the sideways view

Breaking news arrives through notifications pushed from the newsroom, so the app can reach you when something significant happens rather than waiting for your next visit. Sharing is built in as well, with stories going out to Twitter, Facebook or email, which covers the usual ways people pass a link along to friends or family.

One smaller touch worth noting is the rotation behavior: turn the device sideways and you get a different visual view of the news. It is the kind of detail that suggests some thought went into reading on a phone rather than simply porting a website.

The most recent update added an author view to articles and fixed a message that could appear incorrectly when content failed to load. Both are maintenance-level improvements rather than new directions.

What you need before you start

The app is a free download, so getting started is a matter of installing it and choosing what you want to follow. The personalized feed depends on those choices, so the first few minutes are best spent picking topics and teams deliberately rather than accepting whatever the app defaults to.

Notifications are part of the package, and breaking news alerts are only useful if you let them through. That is a decision worth making consciously, since an app built around as-it-happens coverage will lean on them. The ads and the in-app purchases are the other things to weigh before you commit to it as a daily read.

The reader this app was built for

The clearest fit is someone who already reads the Tribune and wants that reporting on their phone without going through a browser. If Chicago politics, the city's teams, its business scene and its restaurants are part of your regular reading, the app gathers all of it under one roof and lets you tune the mix.

Sports-first readers are well served by the team-following setup, particularly anyone who cares about more than one of the five franchises. Readers who want the dining and nightlife coverage as their main reason to open the app will also find it treated as a proper section rather than filler.

Where I would temper expectations is the overall package. A 2.6 average from a substantial number of ratings is a signal that plenty of users have found something to dislike, and the presence of ads and in-app purchases means the free download is not the whole arrangement. None of that changes what the app is for, but it is worth factoring in before you make it your main source.

A focused pick for Chicago readers

The Chicago Tribune app is worth installing if Chicago is your city and you want one newsroom's coverage of it, organized around your own interests. The topic-based feed, the individual team following, saved stories and breaking news alerts add up to a capable daily reader for local news, sports, business and entertainment.

I would recommend it to people who already have a relationship with the Tribune's reporting, and to sports fans who want to track specific teams rather than skim a general section. The dining and nightlife coverage gives it a second reason to stay on your home screen.

Go in knowing it is a free, ad-supported app with in-app purchases, and that its user rating sits at 2.6. If you want broad national and international coverage, this is not the tool for that job, but as a Chicago-focused reader it does what it sets out to do.

What's new in version 10.0.62

Added new author view to articles Fixed inadvertent "unable to load this content" message