Orlando Sentinel Reviews

You can tell the Sentinel, once part of the proud Chicago Tribune chain, is owned by a venture capital company. There’s no investment in the paper, just in its overlords’ profits. I pay $16 a month for a subscription to electronic content only, but trying to read the paper is nearly impossible. The website is stocked with filler, old news, brief, never-followed up police reports, and short paragraphs rewritten from Twitter. The e-newspaper, a replica of the print version, has some substance, but the damned thing crashes or produces a black screen whenever I try to access it. I pay twice as much for my Sentinel subscription as I do for my Tampa Bay Times ($7 a month) and Washington Post ($100 a year) e-subscriptions. If the e-paper just worked I would grumble but put up with it to support local journalism. But to cancel I have to spend a minimum of 30 minutes on hold before I can talk to some guy in India who functions as the circulation department. Maybe I’ll just cancel the credit card the subscription is attached to. That might be easier. Seriously, think twice about purchasing a subscription here. The Sentinel was a good paper 20 years ago. Now with cost cutting to the bone, there’s very little left, and good luck trying to find a way to read it.

Despite not having access to my account due to a bug for weeks/months, I was charged the full amount for the duration and refused a refund. I first tried to contact them by email and never heard back. Then called. The guy on the phone was impatient and put in a ticket for IT to email me. It took days between messages to get a response. I am currently disputing the charges with my credit card company.

I would not recommend subscribing to this newspaper. After the intro offer expires, it is overpriced for the content and OrlandoSentinel is apparently prone to technical issues.

Update: I canceled my subscription last year and recently been getting charged again. Very annoying to have to do a charge back every month. OS has just been going down hill since they were bought out.

I don’t really understand why but the Orlando Sentinel app is terrible. Too many alerts even with most setting turned off. Every article gets opened in web view, requiring me to login again everytime I open OrlandoSentinel . Until finer notification control and proper app integration are added I will be uninstalling and exclusively using the website. To add to this review, even when articles open in OrlandoSentinel on my iPad they still ask me to login and subscribe despite already doing both years ago. Orlando sentinel is great at reporting but they might want to outsource their iOS devops

After countless attempts, calls to customer service, emails and finally a snail mail to the finally responsive customer service, I have tried to call it quits. Customer service reached out and for one day, I could access the epaper. Today, once again, I get the pop up shield that informs me I must subscribe to continue reading. I have paid their introductory charge, have it on my credit card statement, but cannot access beyond page one. This is very frustrating, as customer service appears either overwhelmed, understaffed, or practically nonexistent. This has been the case since May 23. I’m not sure where this review will go, but if you’re considering their one year for $3.00, good luck, as I have had none.

Extremely poor app, finding the days news is extremely difficult beyond a few top stories. The only way to really read everything is to use the e edition, which frequently crashes and doesn’t let you view all the pages. Happens almost daily. The e edition is stuffed with so many ads, not only do you get all the ads in the print version you get lots of extra ads, this is very disappointing as a paying subscriber. I also subscribe to the Daytona Beach news journal and their app is a thousand times better. You would think a company such as the Orlando sentinel could have an app that functions correctly , maybe they need to check out what the news journal is doing.

I paid for a physical delivery subscription over a year ago. It is basically a donation to keep local news. I want to support Orlando Sentinel really. I finally figured out on my own how to have access digitally with my subscription. Now I am finally reading the news and the pops for ads are almost constant. I can read maybe 5 words in between each pop up. I am paying!! If there has to be ads too then how about one short clip for every story and not this constant interruption. I am probably going to cancel yet again as what am I really getting. No delivery and constant ads.

After the Sentinel changed the way their login was authenticated and would no longer work within the News app, I was forced to download this garbage app in order to use my subscription. I have to constantly log in, force close OrlandoSentinel , and log in again in order to read more than one article because for some reason OrlandoSentinel can’t maintain my session for longer than a minute.

Not only that, but when I try to read articles using my PAID subscription, I am constantly assaulted by video popup after video popup, making trying to catch up with the local news next to impossible.

There is also no “local news” section within OrlandoSentinel , so I have to sift through a combination of Associated Press articles from around the country to figure out what is happening in Central Florida.

Overall, OrlandoSentinel is worthless. It may even be frustrating enough to cause me to cancel my subscription to the Sentinel.

One of the worst apps on my devices. It’s never works. I’ve been a subscriber for years and the only way I can read the digital paper is through the link I’m emailed. If I don’t get the link (days like today) there no way I can get the paper through OrlandoSentinel. It opens fine and on the second page there is a sign in notice. Once I sign in there is another notice that I’ve reached my free limit. Forget about customer service. All they do is give you instructions how to sign in. I can’t imagine the number of subscribers they’re missing by not fixing OrlandoSentinel.

I see this is a common issue, that has been occurring for months. Why has it not yet been fixed? It doesn’t matter if I’m on the iOS app or logged in through a browser. In fact I just logged in on Safari to read an article and when I clicked on it, I got the pop up again. This is a terrible reader experience that might necessitate canceling my worthless subscription.

Very frustrating. I have a digital subscription, which charges me without fail, but it never stays logged in. I receive alerts that I can’t actually read in OrlandoSentinel . They open in Safari. I’m repeatedly blocked, saying that I’ve reached my monthly limit of free articles, prompting me to sign in. I sign in, but I still can’t view the articles. I can use OrlandoSentinel fine, if I’m just browsing, but opening a targeted article never works. I have to search for it, defeating the point of the alerts.

Is this lack of consistency a lack of testing or an inattention to detail? I am a subscriber who receives email notifications about news. When I click on the link in the email, I get a message saying I have exceeded my free reading. If I log in, I get the general news and not the particular one from the email. If I open OrlandoSentinel , which is yet another selection on the same page, I still don’t get to the news I was looking for. This behavior is incredibly annoying.

This used to be a perfectly serviceable news app that I liked using as an Orlando sentinel subscriber.

After the last few patches, I’m plagued by full screen video ads that come back as soon as I exit them, I constantly have to log back in, and it’s hard to find the stories that pop up as notifications if they don’t load right the first time, which happens often.

I really wish OrlandoSentinel associated with a service I pay to support worked more reliably with fewer bugs and annoying design decisions.

I live in Orlando so like to read the local newspaper and subscribe to OrlandoSentinel. But it is frustrating because it often assumes I’m not a subscriber and I have to login repeatedly. Sometimes twice in one session. Now it keeps having videos pop up to the point that I can’t read an article. Also many of the news items that are in the actual print edition take me to the Sun-Sentinel website and ask me for a different login. I would like to support our local newspaper but if OrlandoSentinel doesn’t improve, I’m going to have to drop my subscription.

Why remove the landscape orientation in the latest update? Really? Who benefits from the removal of an OPTION in favor of a mandate? This makes absolutely NO sense. I use landscape orientation for ALL of my apps on my iPad and have had no issues reading Sentinel articles that way. What’s more, my iPad case when opened sets optimum viewing for landscape mode. Not only is it annoying and inconvenient to turn my iPad for just one app, it makes my iPad unlevel and uncomfortable to use. Please restore the landscape option! For the life of me I can’t comprehend any harm to anyone in doing so.

My wife and I are part time Floridians, and this is the closest newspaper to our home. Accessing the online edition is OK, but if i try to open any article individually, it goes into an endless loading cycle on my iPad. Tried deleting/reloading multiple times and no change. IOS is up to date. Can only read paper by constant pinching and zooming.
OrlandoSentinel also has an annoying tendency to randomly kick me off and tell me I have no subscription, causing me to have to log in several times.

OrlandoSentinel throws up a lot of advertisements. Scroll two paragraphs into an article, BOOM. Full screen ad takes over. Sometimes articles display in web format, sometimes in app format. In a word, it's clunky. A real shame because this kind of experience could drive away subscribers, especially at the price we're paying. We can't afford to lose our local paper!!

I get an email with links to stories and tap on the one I want to see. It opens safari and then tells me I have reached my monthly limit (I am a subscriber- I should not have a limit). At the top of the safari screen it provides a link to open OrlandoSentinel . Tap the link and OrlandoSentinel opens at its home page, not at the article I wanted. Been doing this for many months, one would think that it’s an obvious bug. If a subscriber (or not) gets an email with links, and their phone has OrlandoSentinel , it should open OrlandoSentinel , not safari. Please fix this annoying bug. Otherwise OrlandoSentinel seems to work well.

It’s always there, on my drive or on line. Well worth the money. A democracy depends on its newspapers. I pay for the Sentinel, NYT, Washington Post, and WSJournal. OK, I’m a retired news junkie. But I want news from professional, trained journalists. I want to know what our local, state, and national representatives are doing. I almost always, including this year vote a split ticket. Those who get “free” news from cable or internet get a lot of untruths, lies, that may have been planted by Russia, China, or Iran. Our newspapers make mistakes, but most separate editorial from news, and correct when they make mistakes. The Sentinel tries to do that. And they support Scot Maxwell, who is one of the best there is. I always read him first. I have had a Sentinel subscription since I moved to Florida in 1963. Have never been sorry.

As a former Central Florida resident with friends and family still in the area, it’s a great way to keep in touch as to the comings and going‘s and notes of interest in the area. More than once I’ve been told I know more about what’s going on in the area than those that live down there do.

The only thing that I miss is the way it used to be organized because to me it is now a little bit harder to find sections of interest that I used to enjoy reading. Other than that I enjoy OrlandoSentinel .

As a longtime reader of the Sentinel via hard copy and digital, I can wholeheartedly give the Sentinel team 5 stars for consistently providing the vital information citizens need to live, work, and contribute to the community. Please keep up the great work. We trully appreciate the y'all🤙🤟🙏