Anyway in the whole “web app” vs “native app” debate the newspaper use case is really symptomatic. There is absolutely no technical justification to provide a newspaper edition in a native application (as oppose to a web application that would handle it much better imho, NIWEA anyone ?). The rational is obviously on the business side as the app store/market provides the much needed go-to-market channel that integrates the money transaction.

If you fancy building a start-up, here is an idea (for what it is worth… a sanity check, the business plan and the execution plan is left to the reader :-): A newspaper subcription portfolio

End-user features:

• Manage a virtual wallet of newspaper subscription
• Able to buy individual article, subscribe for a week/month/year to every newspaper/editor participating (see below)
• My articles: list of articles that I have bought and/or marked as “favorites”
• My view: list (in River of News format) of daily articles available to me from my subscription (with the possibility of sorting them in different category – sport, economy,…)
• Social layer with possibility to “like” and comment article (obviously the traditional bridge to existing social network like Twitter and Facebook is a must)
• Multi-channel (ie. an end-user can access and read an article he bought from any device)

Editors features:

• Easy integration on the backend/frontend with existing database and existing user base.
• Ability to access subscribers profiles and informations (some statistics on readers usage and habits might be useful)
• …

Additional thoughts

• Looks a lot like a RSS Reader (like Google Reader) with the additional transaction layer
• Big players in the best position to implement that service in-house: PayPal, Google,…
• Probably difficult to sell the idea to Editors/publishers who like to own the user profile.
• The digital book is an use case related to the newspaper one, and here is what look like a nice execution of the Book in the cloud use case: Booki.sh
• The mobile app market is upposedly worth $58 billion by 2014… would be nice to capture a little part of the pie no ?