Month: January 2010

I want to love iPad; is that so wrong?

ipadAt the beginning of January, I wrote a hopeful post about the coming introduction of what we now know to be the Apple iPad.

On re-reading it, I’m glad to say I was appropriately not giddy. I simply said the new device, if it met expectations, could provide a strong enough platform that media would use it to begin their evolution toward a digital-only era, which is essentially inevitable. (Essentially, because I don’t believe print will  go away completely. But it will become a niche solution with fewer players and more limited application).

As the print media watch their business model melt down, they desperately need something that allows them to translate their work into an electronic format. Computer screens and e-zine platforms don’t do it. Hand-held devices don’t do it.

Will the iPad? Maybe. The device looks pretty cool. Myself, I’d be excited to use what is essentially a magazine-sized iPod Touch as a reading device. It’s far more compelling to me than the limited e-book readers like the Kindle. (Some of my most gadget-oriented acquaintances are already dumping their book-reading devices – not in anticipation of the iPad, but because they don’t want to use them anymore.)

Most entertaining to me has been watching the different media report on the iPad’s big reveal. The print media have been agog and amazed. They have, if anything, let their financial needs show from under their skirts. The print media is so giddy about the device that it has probably overplayed its importance.

My favorite lead, from the L.A. Times referred to the iPad as “the most anticipated tablet since Moses’.”

But broadcast reports tell me those folks don’t get it. They are announcing the iPad as if it’s just another gadget. One local pretty face actually said, “I don’t understand what the fuss is about. It seems like as soon as you get one gadget they come out with another that you have to buy.”

Oh, she gets it all right. Just like the average Joe, who neither cares nor understands that an entire industry is pinning its hopes on this thing.

It gives me a bit of a chill, because I’d like to see some real innovation by magazine publishers and newspaper publishers to utilize the full capabilities of a tablet like the iPad. I’d like to see something that brings a traditional magazine to a new level that’s closer to Facebook than 60 Minutes. But most people will just look at the price tag and ask, “Do I really need this?”

Absent some really good media products, I’m not really sure what the iPad is best for; it’s a really expensive e-book reader and not a replacement for a laptop computer. It’s a new category altogether and it demands new content. Or it won’t sell.

So, you print media types, get to work – and fast. If you don’t, the iPad could be deemed a failure before you ever get your chance. (Not that I’m betting against Apple.)

Which raises another concern: If the iPad costs $600-$1,000, and monthly service costs another $30, how much is a subscription to Newsweek, People, Vanity Fair or Playboy going to cost?

Will people pay for a reader and monthly service knowing that what they’ve really done is spent all that money just to enable them to pay for more content? And what about all that other media we all buy: cable TV, smart phones, Netflix, Satellite radio…

How much media will people pay for.

Thinking about it, as curious as I am about the iPad, I’m about tapped out. Unless it can replace something else I’m already paying for, I can’t afford to lead the print-consuming audience to its new online Shangri-La.

For what it’s worth, here are some other takes on the iPad:

MediaPost: Even Apple can’t save newspapers

Techcrunch: 10 reasons why iPad will put Kindle out of business

Newsosaur: Can iPad save media? Skeptics weigh in

With Apple tablet, print hope for a new payday

iPad is most important for businesses not named Apple

Apple’s tablet could change the face of publishing

A fascinating prediction about the future of media

In iMedia Connection, Adam Broitman boldly predicts the death of offline media. His skillful headline almost – but not quite – predicts that it will happen in 2010.

Ignore that; that’s just headline-writing 101 – making the message immediately relevant. 2010 will inevitably bring more bad news for old-line media. But it will still be very much alive by the end of 2010.

But Broitman makes a great point, and I think he’s dead on.

His point is that online media will continue to supplant what he calls offline media (and what I, anachronistically perhaps, refer to as traditional media) at ever-increasing speed.

He gives two examples why (he claims there are three, but only two clearly jumped out at me from the column):

  1. The skill and frequency with which offline media are using the web and social media – moving from passive entertainment/information to true interaction.
  2. Applications being developed that shift the notion of information and search from keywords you type into a box on the web to something more contextual: information that comes to you because you ask a question out loud, or because you point a camera phone at an object.

There’s another irony; while media is becoming more active, search is becoming more passive. When selling print advertising, I made the point that consumers use print and online differently. Print was for grazing – looking for things you didn’t know to think about; online was for finding information you knew you wanted. Those purposes are merging. If Marshall McLuhan were still around, he’d have to rewrite Understanding the Media as TV becomes “hot” and Google becomes “cool.”

Too often, media allow themselves to be steered by past experience – their own and that of consumers.

For instance, all sorts of new studies proclaim to know whether people will pay for online content. How do they know? They ask.

But they ask things like: “Would you pay for this newspaper online.” The answer to that isn’t helpful; a newspaper isn’t built for online consumption – and the prospect of reading it online is unappealing. So people will say no.

People who answer such surveys haven’t generally put thought into what they would pay for online. They’ll just know it when they see it. Which means that it’s the job of the media to figure out its own future; the audience isn’t going to be much help.

So the real point that I take from Broitman’s column is one that’s essentially unspoken: offline media will continue to decline because of the relentless growth in online offerings that will be worthy buying.

The unresolved question is how many of these offerings will be created by startups vs. the existing “offline” media.

A morale-boost for beleaguered newsies: E&P lives

Editor & Publisher – was shuttered in December by its owner, Nielsen Business Media – has been sold and will continue to publish, according to a report by Folio: magazine. E&P is more than 100 years old, and has been the leading trade publication of the newspaper industry for most, if not all, of its history. Its demise was a blow to the gut to journalists everywhere, who for the last few years have watched the apparent meltdown of their industry’s fundamental business model.

The new owner is Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., based in Irvine, CA – a white knight that rides in, not on a horse but on a powerboat. Duncan McIntosh is a consumer marine media company whose properties include Sea Magazine, The Log newspaper and, most notably, Boating World.

There’s no deeper meaning to this. It’s just nice to write about  a company that sees the value in a storied brand, tradition and a franchise that serves the media industry. No surprise that the company isn’t one of the diversified media giants, for which earnings multiples are the only meaningful metric.

One more self-destructive act by the media

In an attempt to increase advertising revenue, media organizations have pretty much declared that they’ll put ads anywhere.

Last year, the New York Times began putting ads on the front page – which raised eyebrows among media purists, but was a non-event when it comes to changing the reader experience one way or the other.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is in-text advertising (click for an example) –  contextual links embedded in news articles online, which unleash a pop-up ad when the cursor simply passes over them. The pop-up appears exactly where you happen to be reading, and it doesn’t go away until you click on the ad or on the little X in the top-right corner.

It’s the online equivalent of a squirting flower on the lapel. Or a kick in the groin.

A number of companies offer this, though Vibrant Media seems to be the market leader at dragging advertisers into this very bad place.

I don’t know why websites or advertisers want anything to do with something that is certain to tick off the very people they’re trying to woo.

In any case, somewhere in the middle of the range between the Times’ front page ads and Vibrant Media’s stick in the eye is a new effort from Hearst and Format Dynamics, to impose ads on printouts of online articles.

This isn’t as disruptive as in-text advertising; it doesn’t literally get in your way of seeing the very words you’re trying to read. But consumers won’t say ‘thank you’ when printing out a one-page article requires burning through an extra two or three pages of color ink just for the ads.

OK, I can hear the publishers’ response: People don’t pay for the content and we have to monetize it somehow.

I get that. But let’s face a few realities:

  1. Advertisers aren’t begging for this capability. It’s been developed by a technology vendor, and is being sold to media companies as a means of bolstering declining ad revenue. This capability is being pushed through the market, not pulled from the advertiser.
  2. It’s still the old-fashioned approach of forcing ads in front of a target audience – an approach that is more part of advertising’s past than its future. (If you disagree, just look at the trend in traditional ad spending vs. the trend in spending on social media/inbound marketing/content marketing).
  3. It’s of dubious value. If readers don’t avail themselves of an advertiser’s information online when it’s the most convenient to respond, why are they going to respond offline – especially after being forced to provide the resources to print the ad in the first place?
  4. If publishers keep pushing instrusive advertising to cover the cost of generating content, they’ll never succeed at getting consumers to pay for the content directly. Who would pay for something that is already underwritten through such a visible and somewhat objectionable method?

Eventually, consumers will come to understand that content costs money.

Smart publishers are building revenue from their readers now. They aren’t trying to figure out ways to nurse a few extra shekels out of a declining line of business at the expense of alienating the readers on which their very futures depend.

But would you pay to read a digital magazine like THIS?

I call them e-book people; they’re  publishing types who see a big future for media distribution – not just books, but also magazines and newspapers – through e-readers and tablet devices.

They include folks I know pretty well, like David Nussbaum of F+W Media (the consumer-special-interest giant that touches people who are into anything from creative writing to geneology to knitting or woodworking), to folks I know only by reputation, like Alan Meckler of WebMediaBrands (events and online communities surrounding media and technology).

They’ve been building excitement for months, maybe longer, over the prospect that Apple will eventually come out with a category-smashing tablet that puts Amazon’s market-leading Kindle e-reader to pasture.

Based on the recent press (like this, from the NJ Star Ledger), it appears as if it’s finally about to happen. And not only should the folks behind the Kindle and other first-generation e-readers be scared, but newspaper and magazine executives should rejoice. This is the vehicle that could finally direct them down a clear path toward the future.

The problem with current e-readers is that they’re good for text and not much else. They don’t handle graphics well, so they aren’t useful for  technical books or anything with color pictures. E-readers, as they currently exist, are basically good for best-selling books. They’re a single-application device, and the next-generation unit – whether it comes from Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google or anyone else – will do to them what the Palm Pilot did for the Apple Newton.

Which is the long way of getting to the real point: When the tablet PCs start to come out, newspapers and magazines will have a great opportunity to try and reinvigorate their existing business model, or to build on the more obvious business model that they simply have to make work.

The old business model is advertising, and the high-touch interactivity that a tablet PC could offer advertisers might be enough to entice them back to the traditional media marketplace. I’m sure it eventually will help to flatten out the downward trend for print advertising revenue. But I don’t believe it will ever halt the juggernuat of advertisers who seek to aggregate their own audiences and produce their own content – which is what the new age of marketing is all about.

But the new business model has more hope. That’s the one in which people actually pay for the content they use. It’s the only obvious next place for media to go. But up to now, there hasn’t been a vehicle that presents print media better than the existing hard-copy formats of magazines and newspapers. Those are so expensive to produce that, without growing advertiser support, there has been no hope of shifting their full cost to consumers.

Can the tablet change that? Not in a hurry. But here’s what it CAN do:

It can give publishers a medium that is powerful enough for them to create something new – something that extends beyond the boundaries of the newspapers and magazines they already produce.

This goes back to the old Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message.” Up to now, solutions like e-zine interfaces have simply been an attempt to push old messages into a new medium. The mismatch has been underwhelming at best.

But the tablet can create a new message – a new set of boundaries for old print media companies to create electronic-only products that generate real excitement among consumers. The kind of excitement people pay for.

For example, check out this proof-of-concept video from Sports Illustrated:

If products like this really come around, I’d pay three or four times what I do now for a magazine subscription. Would that cover the cost of generating the content? It’s a question for the market to handle. But if it also arrested the decline in advertising revenue, there might actually be a business in this.

This isn’t a short-term solution. Tablet prices will start out too high for any publication to convert a meaningful number of subscribers. And ad revenue won’t follow until that changes.

And it will take years of education before consumers understand why tablet-based publications are the future of media. Just consider some of the comments that people left after viewing SI’s video:

There are probably many kids here that think this is wonderful but i am not sure if they have the capacity to think! What will most likely happen is that the selling price (books, magazines, etc) will not reflect the savings and? they will be able to control what you have on your device and how long you have it for. This is not good for the consumer. It is not a good idea that content providers decide how you have access to information (be they Apple Microsoft or Google).

Do I need another electronic product to add to my cumbersome life?
How? many other things you have to carry around with you 24/7 to keep you up-to-date?


I don’t see the point of this. Nobody is going to buy this thing just to read e-magazines. Why not just load the …damn website? Seems like people are desperate to save print-based magazines. Make this smaller, like the Kindle, and strip away all this excess so it reads books. Then I’ll consider.

OK, so people don’t get it yet. And they aren’t ready to pay for a digital subscription. But as more and more magazines disappear, and more innovators build great content for tablets, the correct path for media will begin to unfold.

More magazines going mobile

esquire-iphoneAccording to MediaBuyerPlanner.com, Esquire (Hearst) and GQ (Conde Nast) magazines are now being offered in an iPhone edition. You can download them for $2.99 per issue.

This small step forward isn’t going to offset revenue losses from advertsing. Nor is it going to revolutionize the way people read magazines.

But it may evolutionize the way we read magazines and newspapers. It’s a small step but a great step.

GQ and Esquire are not alone. Time and BusinessWeek, among many others, have offered mobile websites – accessed through free iPhone and Blackberry apps. But the effort by Hearst and Conde Nast to monetize the use of smart phones is a step forward that the media need to take.

Is the effort any good? I don’t know. I’m a Blackberry user, and these brands aren’t available in a Blackberry version. So I can’t answer whether they’re worth $2.99 an issue. I don’t know how faithfully the print content is reproduced, or if it’s all re-jiggered for a better smart-phone experience than either magazine would seem to offer in its print edition.

But I’m anxious to give any such mobile publishing effort a test run. While people are wringing their hands over consumers’ unwillingness to pay for content, the research is starting to reverse. More and more surveys are showing the people have warmed up to the idea of paying for content.

I think the real problem is that when people need to know what that content would be. If you ask, for instance, “Would you read a newspaper on your smart phone?” most people are going to think of the newspaper they know, reduced to the size of a playing card. Who could be satisfied with that?

But  I’m hoping GQ and Esquire will show us how their content can be repackaged and repurposed – providing one experience in print and another experience – different but just as  fulfilling –  on the smallest screen.

That’s where the next generation of media success will be found.