Years ago I traveled into the city each day from southern Connecticut on Metro North.  Many of my co-commuters carried the New York Times with them in the morning and the New York Post at night.  The Times was for work and the Post was for pleasure.  It’s a distinction that’s reinforced by the tablet versions of these two newspapers.  The tablet edition of the Times is supremely elegant graphically; there’s a great deal of light and space on each screen.  But the links to almost all the articles – whether blurbs or features – are formatted in identical little squares with identical fonts.  There’s no clear hierarchy in the graphics to tell you what’s important to read.  And you can’t eye adjacent headlines and photos peripherally, as you can in the print edition, and circle through the paper this way.  It’s real work reading the day’s news items thoroughly on a tablet.

The New York Post, on the other hand, has developed a tablet version of their paper that preserves a great deal of the pleasure you get from reading it physically.  The splash page is simply a digital version of the print edition’s front page, with the same bad graphics and desperate puns (“Zoo-ccotti Park”), and the rest of the paper follows suit.  The tablet edition is an almost literal page-to-screen translation of the physical edition, with different news items, headlines and photographs crowded onto the same page. You can scroll up and down each column of print individually, which seems, somehow, more newspaper-like than swiping or tapping.  The  headlines (“He Woke Up from A Coma - Gay,” “Herm Made Her Squirm”) are rendered in the same monstrous, irregular fonts as in the print edition.  And there’s a navigation bar at the bottom that makes it easy to flip back and forth.  It’s the same trashy fun as the tabloid.