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Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

U.S. vinyl sales grew for the fifth consecutive year in 2012, with a 19 percent year-over-year increase.

As digital becomes more pervasive, it seems that we are increasingly fetishizing the physical and tactile. We’re embracing things like old-time typewriters, wristwatches, physical books and face-to-face time with friends and loved ones—things being rendered obsolete in the digital era. As we spend ever more time in the digital world, we increasingly value the time we don't spend in front of a screen—the time we spend with real people and real things.

more than two-thirds of American adults sometimes feel nostalgic for things from the past, like vinyl records and photo albums, and more than six in 10 have a greater appreciation for things that aren’t used as much as they used to be, like record players and film cameras. This appreciation is felt more by the younger generations, with 67 percent of millennials and 65 percent of Gen Xers in agreement, compared with 56 percent of baby boomers.

research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.

the partnership is a very public acknowledgement of the industry’s faith behind investing in a more visual, native approach to advertising in response to the emergence of the Visual Web.

While Instagram may have been one of the first to lay the groundwork for purely visual content, it is not alone. Every day, more publishers—including Time, Fox News and NBC News—are redesigning their sites in a visual-centric manner and de-emphasizing text. The escalating adoption of mobile has necessitated the change. Images are the way today’s tech-savvy consumers prefer to consume content.

Brands will now create and design ads with the clear objective of having this branded content be shared exponentially.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.

some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

Readers of some of the top U.S. news sites are more engaged when they go directly to the website rather than through Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center released on Monday. The research found that users who come directly to a news site spend about three times as long per visit, or almost five minutes on average. Those who find the news by searching or through Facebook spend about two minutes.Direct visitors also view about five times as many pages per month as those coming through Facebook referrals or through search engines such as Google Inc.

yet the research shows that those readers who come to an article or video through Facebook are younger and more fickle in their loyalties.

"Even sites such as digital native BuzzFeed and National Public Radio's npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly."