Leeds Student newspaper launches iPad app

The Leeds Student has launched what is understood to be one of the first editions of a student newspaper in the UK on the iPad.

Digital editor Jack Dearlove explains how the new digital edition of the student title came to fruition:

Hailed as a "game changer" by Rupert Murdoch, publishing to the iPad is on most print organisations' to-do lists for 2012. However, up until now the student newspaper industry has left publishing to the digital screen untouched. That changed this week when the work of a small team at the Leeds Student was approved for release by Apple.

The app took two months to develop and was mainly put together by the newspaper's editor and digital editor, with help from the paper's design team and a couple of students with iPads for testing.

"Fundamentally, we wanted to experiment," said Lizzie Edmonds, editor. "The team who produced the app wanted to start a project that in a few years time could completely change the way Leeds Student is accessed by its audience."



She added that creating the app was pretty painless.

"We built it using QuarkXPress, which is the same program we use to build our print product. The hardest part was getting it through Apple’s approval process, which took a little longer than expected. This was mainly because our app runs through Newsstand, which apple are quite rightly protective of."

The app features a selection of the best content from the regular newspaper, with added photo galleries and interactive ways of displaying reviews. But this interactivity will take extra time to produce, and means the iPad edition will come out a couple of days after the printed edition of the weekly paper.

Edmonds said there is a good reason for the delay: "We could just upload the PDFs of the paper every week but that would be boring. The real advantage of the iPad is that you can bring your newspaper alive, that’s why the team behind the app will be spending a lot of spare time reworking the paper for a digital screen."

It's unclear how many students will download the app. The paper currently has around 50 people a day accessing the website on an iPad, but the team are hopeful that this will increase as their app becomes more well known. After their first full day on the app store the newspaper says the app has been downloaded 117 times - with only 60 of those from the UK.

The free "Leeds Student iPad Edition" is available through Newsstand on Apple's app store.

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