The Press Democrat

Review by eFreeware

What stands out about The Press Democrat's Android app is the amount of control it hands readers over what reaches them. Instead of one undifferentiated stream of local coverage, it offers a Your News tab where you pick the subjects you care about, topic-based push alerts, and a saved list for pieces you want to come back to. That combination is the app's pitch, and it shapes everything else about how it works.

It is built for people with a standing interest in a particular patch of local news, whether that is city politics, a school district, a sports team or the restaurant scene, and who would rather have those stories surfaced than scroll through everything published each day. If you read the paper's site occasionally and take whatever the front page gives you, the app still works, but its real value shows up when you tell it what you follow.

The app is free, carries advertising and offers in-app purchases, and it has been on Google Play since December 2012. It currently sits at a 3.6 average from 280 ratings, with more than 10,000 installs.

A feed you shape yourself

The Your News tab is the centerpiece. You select the topics you are genuinely interested in, and the app then recommends content based on those preferences, which lets you skip past the broader mix of stories the newsroom publishes. In practice this is a filter you set once and refine as your interests shift, and it is the feature that separates this app from simply opening a mobile browser to the paper's homepage.

The same idea carries into notifications. Rather than a single alert stream for everything, you choose which topics you want to be notified about, which keeps breaking-news pings tied to subjects you actually follow. The developer frames this as a less intrusive arrangement, and the logic holds: fewer alerts, better matched to what you asked for.

I would expect this setup to suit someone who follows two or three local threads closely, such as a municipal budget fight or a high school football season, and who wants to hear about those without being buzzed for the rest of the day's output. Readers who prefer to browse a broad front page and discover things by accident will find the personalization less useful, though the other sections of the app remain available.

Saving stories and coming back to them

The save feature lets you bookmark articles and other content for later reading or reference, which matters for local journalism that often has a long tail: a zoning decision, a candidate profile or a seasonal guide you want to revisit weeks later. Saved items are easy to return to later.

Push alerts can also point you to related stories or remind you about ones you saved. That is a reasonable way to keep a reading list from going stale, and because notification topics are configurable, you have some say in how often the app reaches out.

Between the personalized feed and the saved list, the app is set up for a reading pattern built around a handful of running local stories rather than a daily skim of everything. That is a coherent design, and it is worth knowing before you decide how much of your attention to hand over.

The newspaper edition, without a second app

For readers who want the paper as it was laid out rather than as a feed, the app includes the eEdition. You reach it through the Newspaper item in the bottom navigation, and the developer's point is that you do not need to install a separate app to get that experience.

That matters for anyone who grew up reading a printed paper and still wants the front page, the section order and the page-by-page flow. The eEdition sits alongside the topic-driven parts of the app rather than replacing them, so you can move between the two depending on whether you want to browse or to target.

The top navigation bar handles movement between sections, by tapping or swiping, which keeps the main areas of the app within a gesture or two of each other.

What you need before you start

Setup is mostly a matter of choices rather than configuration. The app asks you to select the topics you want to follow, and those selections drive both the Your News feed and the notification settings. Taking a few minutes over that step is what makes the rest of the app useful; leaving it at defaults gives you a more generic experience.

I would treat the initial topic selection as the main thing to get right. The app is free to download and carries advertising, and it offers in-app purchases.

The most recent update added an author view to articles, so you can see more from a particular byline, and fixed an error message that could appear when content failed to load. Both are maintenance-level improvements rather than new directions, and they suggest the app is still being worked on rather than left alone.

Who gets the most from it

This app fits readers with a durable stake in one area's news: residents who want to track local government, parents following school coverage, sports fans who care about prep results, or anyone who has moved away from the region and wants to keep up with it. The topic selection and alerts are designed for exactly that kind of ongoing, focused attention.

It is less compelling for someone who reads national and international news first and only occasionally checks a local outlet. The app is organized around local content and the personalization tools assume you have opinions about which local subjects matter.

The 3.6 average from 280 ratings suggests a mixed reception among the people who have rated it, and with more than 10,000 installs the audience is modest. Those numbers are worth weighing alongside your own priorities.

A focused reader for local news

The Press Democrat's app is at its best when you treat it as a curated local briefing rather than a general news reader. Choose your topics, let the Your News tab and the alerts do the filtering, save the pieces you want to return to, and drop into the eEdition when you feel like browsing the paper as printed. That is a clear, workable loop, and the recent fixes to loading and the new author view round it out.

It is free with advertising and in-app purchases, so the cost of trying it is your time and attention rather than money. If you already follow specific threads in this region's news, the personalization is the reason to install it. If you want a broad daily digest of everything, the app's strengths will be less relevant to you.

My recommendation is straightforward: install it if you have a standing interest in local coverage and are willing to spend a few minutes selecting topics at the start. That single step is what turns the app from a generic news feed into something closer to a personal briefing.

What's new in version 10.0.62

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