Contact The Mercury News Support

by Ephonus

I am a long-time subscriber, reader, and fan of the Mercury News e-edition and used to look forward to reading it every morning on my iPad. Not any more. The new version is harder to use from a UI perspective, and it also takes away from the "reading my newspaper on my iPad" experience. A few things that I noticed almost immediately since updating it today:
The use of screen real-estate is highly inefficient. There are huge white spaces, that take up nearly 50% of the screen, to the left and right of the paper. And, there are now ads that take over the bottom 15% of my screen. This isn't what the old version used to have.
Since the entire paper is displayed on your screen all at once, it's hard to read anything easily without zooming in (and this contributes to the white space problem), which is really hard to do. What's harder is zooming out, if I do decide to zoom in.
The "look and feel" of the paper is gone, replaced by a generic white space. I can't just swipe from page to page or scroll up and down anymore.
In the old version, my paper would automatically download in the morning. Now I have to tell the app to download it.
As it stands right now, I find the new version cumbersome and much harder to use. At the very least, I would appreciate it if you could make it so that the older version is available, since I find the new version much harder to read, let alone enjoy.

by Former Good User

I’ve waited to write a review because I thought maybe I just need to get used to new interface. Not the case. Navigation in the new app is terrible because clicking on the “continued on page x” text doesn’t do anything, and clicking on the article completely changes the format. Navigating between sections is also more difficult, as is sizing and moving the window. Last but not least, today I’m being shown the Redlands Daily Facts for no apparent reason, and I can’t find a way to get back to the Mercury. I’ve subscribed to the Mercury for 35 years and have become more reliant on the electronic version as the hard copy has been delivered later and later every morning. I’ve even defended the Mercury to friends and neighbors as the newsroom has been gutted and content has shrunk, but that’s a hard case to make these days. This latest update just adds insult to injury.

by Rating-Guy

I have been a subscriber to the Mercury for decades but the paper keeps getting smaller and most of the stories are from the Washington Post and AP, they have few reporters of their own anymore. The app is the worst piece of crap ever. You will constantly have to give your user name and password because it forgets it almost daily. Further you have to keep zooming in and out to read any article on you iPad or phone. If you double click on a story to get just the text version if you read to the end you will have to scroll all the way to the top to close it. It basically makes reading so frustrating you wind up just closing it and going to another news source. The Wall Street Journal is a much better app. I am probably going to dump my print subscription soon as I can get almost everything they print from other sources at a better price.