Cincinnati.com: The Enquirer

Review by eFreeware

If you live in or around Cincinnati and want to keep up with what is happening locally, this is the app built for that. Cincinnati.com: The Enquirer comes from USA TODAY Co. and gathers breaking news, watchdog reporting, sports and entertainment coverage from the city's daily paper into a phone app. I'd expect it to appeal most to readers who already follow the Enquirer's reporting and want it delivered with alerts rather than through a browser.

The scope is deliberately local. The developer describes the app as Cincinnati's source for local and breaking news, with sports coverage of the Reds and Bengals, dining guides and high school athletics. For someone whose news diet is mostly national, that focus will feel narrow; for someone who cares about city hall, the food scene and Friday night football, it is exactly the right shape.

Downloading it costs nothing, and a limited number of articles are free to read each month. Beyond that sampling, the app also carries ads and offers in-app purchases. That combination is worth understanding before you install, and I go through what it means further down.

What the For You page and alerts bring to your phone

The feature the developer leads with is the personalized feed on the For You page. Rather than scrolling a single chronological list, you get a stream assembled around what you read, which is the pattern most news apps have settled on. For a local paper with this much daily output, that is a reasonable way to keep the important stories near the top instead of letting them sink under the day's wire copy.

Real-time breaking news alerts are the other headline feature. These are the notifications that pull you back into the app when something significant happens in the area. If you want to know about local events as they unfold, this is the part of the app that does the most work.

The two features complement each other well: alerts for the moments that cannot wait, and a personalized feed for everything else. I would treat the alert settings as something to look at early.

The eNewspaper, puzzles and podcasts

The eNewspaper is a digital replica of the print edition, which means the paper as it was laid out rather than a feed of individual stories. Readers who grew up with the print product often prefer this, since the placement of a story on a page still carries meaning. It sits alongside the feed rather than replacing it, so you can move between the two depending on how much time you have.

The developer also lists puzzles and podcasts among the app's features. Puzzles are a long-standing newspaper habit transplanted to the phone, and podcasts give the reporting a spoken form for people who would rather listen than read. Neither is the reason to install the app, but both add reasons to open it on a quiet morning.

Sports coverage reaches further than the professional teams. Along with the Reds and Bengals, the app covers high school athletics and culminates in an annual Cincinnati H.S. Sports Awards. That local-sports layer is a real part of what the app offers.

The reporting itself is presented as watchdog journalism that holds Ohio's powerful accountable, alongside dining guides and community coverage. Its newsroom has earned honors such as a Pulitzer for local reporting. Awards are not a guarantee of anything you will personally enjoy, but they do indicate a newsroom investing in original reporting rather than aggregation.

The subscription, the ads and the monthly limit

Once that sampling is used, a subscription is what keeps you reading. Payment is taken when the purchase is confirmed, and the plan renews monthly or yearly unless canceled a day ahead of the period ending. Subscription support details and customer service contacts are worth knowing about if billing questions come up.

There are ads in the app as well, and in-app purchases are offered. I would not treat the free tier as a full substitute for a subscription. If you read the Enquirer daily, the subscription is the part of this app that matters most; if you check in occasionally, the free sampling may be enough to keep you informed.

The app carries a content rating of Everyone 10+, though nothing about a news app is inherently unsuitable for older readers. Expect the usual mix you would find in a newspaper: crime, politics and sports, with the occasional story that is not for everyone.

How I would use it day to day

My instinct would be to set the app up around a routine rather than checking it constantly. A morning pass through the For You feed and the eNewspaper covers the overnight stories, and the alerts handle anything that breaks during the day. That split keeps the notifications meaningful instead of turning them into background noise.

The dining guides are the feature I would return to outside the news cycle. They are the kind of local knowledge that is hard to assemble yourself, and they give the app a life beyond headlines. Sports readers will likely spend their time on the Reds and Bengals coverage, with the high school section coming into its own in season.

The app was released in February 2012 and the most recent update, in September 2026, is described as bug fixes and stability improvements. That is a maintenance release rather than a feature drop, which is normal for a news app of this age. It tells you the app is being kept running, not that anything new has arrived.

One thing to weigh is the reception so far: 50,000+ installs and a 2.6 average across 530 ratings. That is a modest score, and I would read it as a sign that the app has not won over everyone who tried it. I would not treat the number as a verdict on the journalism.

A local paper for people who follow Cincinnati closely

This app is for readers who want Cincinnati news from the city's daily paper in a single place, with alerts for breaking stories and a feed that adapts to what they read. The eNewspaper, the puzzles and the podcasts round it out, and the sports coverage runs from the Reds and Bengals down to high school athletics. If that describes your news habits, the app covers the ground well.

The trade-offs are straightforward. The app is also tightly focused on one metropolitan area.

I would install it if Cincinnati is your home or your home team, and go in expecting to decide fairly quickly whether the free sampling is enough or whether a subscription makes sense for how much you read. For anyone who follows the city closely, that decision is usually easy.

What's new in version 8.13.2

• This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements.