MediaVidea

At SXSW, Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times' interactive editor points out what is bad with most iPad news applications:

"I'm sceptical about apps generally. It takes you out of the web. You come in to this isolated, one-person web..." 

Why The "killer app" on every handset is the good old browser
Aron says,

"There's so little you cannot do with offline storage in the browser environment that to me [the iPad] is almost not worth the investment.

Apps are so anti-community
Aron says,

"Community is a place where the web is your friend and the app is not. If you consider community to be part of the answer to the future of news then going into the partially-stilted environment of the application walks away from that."

iPad news apps are minor footnotes in digital publishing history
This is what Khoi Vinh, who once headed the digital publishing design unit at the the New York Times, thinks. Khoi says,

The future...is in the multiplatform browser - publishing's "natural home".

Related:
Are iPad news apps glorified CD ROMs?