“We wanted to give users a seamless experience that seems like it’s been designed for
the device they’re using.” JAY LEE ESPN DIGITAL MEDIA
each platform.” The Economist, too, debuted an HTML5
web app to coincide with the 2012 election, called ‘Electionism’.
“Electionism is just another opportunity
for us to explore what we’re seeing in our data both internally and externally: that browser use on tablets is pretty high,” says Ron Diorio, vice president of business development and innovation for The Economist Online.
Diorio and The Economist Online aren’t choosing sides between native apps and HTML5.
“Instead of saying what’s going to win or what’s not going to win, we should all be focusing on the reader being the winner,” he says.
‘Electionism’ featured six main categories
that included analysis from The Economist, election news from CQ Roll Call, links from around the web, videos, and election-related tweets by politicians and pundits.
These untethered apps, built exclusively
on HTML5 and only available on the web are an expression of two distinct trends: The backlash against native content apps, and the ‘verticalisation’ of digital content whereby a magazine focuses on either a single story or a time-sensitive event.
So, perhaps, it would seem that the future is now after all. “If we can produce something that 98 per
cent of people can access – and I’m aware there are a lot of combinations of software and tablet we haven’t got to yet – if we can make it open, the better we can be,” Diorio concluded.