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I haven’t seen the new iPad or played with it yet but I’ve certainly heard the hype leading up to its launch yesterday and read and seen the coverage.

You’d think it was the second coming of Christ. Yes, it is another step towards creating a flexible medium for newspapers and magazines - and other content to be downloaded and consumed free of wires, keyboards and location.

For this alone, it’s a great thing. However, and here’s my beef, you have to buy the content through Apple’s store.

That’s like GM selling you a great car but saying you can only drive it on roads approved by GM and gas up at GM’s own stations.

Sorry. Don’t buy it. Like most of their other recent products, the iPad is a riff on existing products which blazed the trail - and assumed the risk - to create a market. the Kinder and the Sony eReader are both products which work and do many of the same things as the iPad.

Granted, the iPad has a faster processor which means the pages respond faster and a touch screen but I suspect we’ll see upgrades to the Kindle and eReader before long. Also worth looking at is the Que which debuted at CES this year and the long awaited Courier from Microsoft which is even more intriguing to me since it is opens like a book with two facing pages.

As a newspaper guy my first reaction to all of this is, great! Now we’ve got something to give us hope because pressing ink on to dead trees is in a death spiral. Oh, newspapers on paper will live on but they will not have the wide spread reach we’ve come to know and expect as a physical product.

Instead, the virtual product will be the one which breaks the geographical barriers that were an economic ball and chain to the physical. Simply put there’s a point in distance after which it is no longer economically feasible to distribute your physical product because the cost of carriage exceeds the revenue generated.

These readers are now in colour with sound. So you can listen to the words being read as you read…good for kids learning and those learning a second language. Or of course you can listen to music while you read….better than needing two devices. Single screen or twin screen, these early models are still better than reading on an iPhone with its limited screen or a laptop which requires a lot more power, is not as easy to read in sunlight and of course is a lot heavier.

The advantage of the readers is their portability and their screens which are very easy on the eyes when reading, unlike laptops or indeed computer monitors. It’s also more of an intimate experience since you hold the reader like a book or newspaper not like a laptop. Right now they cost about $300 to $400 each but I can see that dropping to $100 if they take off. Look what happened to big screen TVs and PCs.Just as radio did not replace newspapers or television replace radio and the internet did not replace all other existing media, merely encapsulated it into a subset,s all forms of media will survive.The book is not dead and with a reader I will likely read more especially if I can buy a book for $8 that once cost $30.Is the author losing? No, established authors can sell directly! Or should, which is why I don’t like the Apple model.Publishers will also have an incentive to find and develop new writers for it is in promoting the work of those writers that they can grow their market at very little cost.

Anyway, back to newspapers and magazines. Designing for these new readers as they evolve won’t be a huge issue since the underlying software is intelligent enough to recognize different formats and adapt.

You see, journalism isn’t dead, it’s just expensive and underfunded and been subject to the death of a thousand cuts over the last decade. What’s broken is the model which funded it.What people, readers, want is timely content, well written, well researched, presented with a minimal bias in an affordable, easy to read and digest format.Whether it’s a book, a magazine or the disposable version, the newspaper (we tend to hang on to books, then magazines longer and throw them out in bundles and trash papers the same day or next day) the demand for that content is still there.What’s killing the print industry is clearly the cost of carriage, that is the cost of putting the text onto dead trees (presses + ink + dead trees) and then trucking it to stores and boxes all over the place.Back in the day when I worked at the Sun the 20 cents (yeah it really was a while ago) you put in the box basically represented the cost of printing plus the cost of delivery (the wholesaler made his cut too) but the real money was made from advertising as we know.In North America we have an advertising driven model because our geography is not dense enough to support the circulation driven model of Europe and Asia where the model is reversed. They don’t have 60 per cent advertising in their papers, much much less. But because they have sheer numbers (circulations of millions) they can make a few pennies on each sale and make a profit.With Online scything the big money makers from papers - the classified ads section for example which were a cash cow until Craigslist and Ebay  - and then diluting the reader draw of features like recipes, sports stats pages, stock pages and the like, it’s been a downward spiral.

What newspapers have - at least some - is the draw of quality reportage and insightful commentary.

Yes, you can get commentary online but most bloggers aren’t worth the pixels to create their logo. And real reportage online usually comes from one of the established, authoritative media outlets.

The broken link is the medium. Something that is comfortable to carry, to read, to navigate yet is affordable and not necessarily disposable but something that isn’t going to break the bank account if it breaks or gets lost (unlike smart phones or laptops which cost hundreds$$$). A pain to break or lose but not so much that it becomes an insurmountable hurdle to replace.

It must however be easy to fit in your shoulder bag or even (dare I dream) a man’s inside jacket pocket. Or maybe come with some unique self supporting carrying system. And it cannot weight more than 200 grams or so.

In fact, newspapers might even borrow from Cell Phone Carriers and offer free eReaders to those who sign up for long term subscriptions, recouping the cost of the readers which they can buy wholesale and customize to their product, much like Rogers or Bell does with their handsets.

While they won’t be able to charge $1 a day for their product as they can for the hard copy, 50 cents or 35 cents is still profitable when you consider the cost of carriage has been eliminated and the cost of carrying the debt on those presses.

At 50 cents a day with 500,000 readers (or more since geographic limits are shattered too) is $250,000 per day. An average newsroom with 200 people making an average $350 a day is $70,000. An IT department is 10 people at $300 a day is $30,000. General Staff and building costs would likely run $100,000 and the advertising department can support itself.

Even with some costs like travel, phones and bureaus there’s still a healthy profit margin without the traditional need to invest millions of dollars in presses and thus generate an ROI of 20 per cent.

So, yes, the iPad is just what the doctor ordered for an ailing industry. It’s good not because the product is so spectacular but because it represents the arrival of a concept for the mass market in the form of an Apple offering which in turn suggests this is a real market and one worth developing.

With the iPad, the Que, eReader, Kindle and Courier we can expect to see some convergence and new thinknig around newspaper design (think Harry Potter movies and the animated newspaper, that is desgin with embadded video and links just liket he web) content, (custom configured newspapers for example) and a way to drive sales since the ads will be interactive.

Talking of design, here’s something that might work with the Courier’s two page format and here’s a couple of interesting ideas around how the physical newspaper of the future might work.

In fact I can see the more sophisticated, more unique and compelling content driven paper also being a premium product of the future.

My only hope is that I can hang on long enough as a freelancer to start reaping some of the benefits as a journalist supply this new market or rather reborn market.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Bark with Byte. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.