Apple's iTunes app store for the iPhone and opportunities for trade publishers

I plan on talking about the iTunes app store more in detail later, but for now here is a lengthy story from the New York Times on the subject. There is no mention of publishers using the store which is strange since the New York Times app (iTunes link) is very popular.

UPDATE 12/9: MarketWatch reports that an analyst for Oppenheimer,  Yair Reiner, has said (leaked) that Apple will be producing tablets in February for a possible March or April product launch.  It's interesting that on Friday Skiff, the Hearst backed platform, made its initial announcement; then yesterday the consortium announcement. Seems that things are heating up in the e-reader world. (And yes, I don't exactly trust these analysts either.)

AOL: the second time around

This week AOL becomes an independent company again and few old media outlets share their opinions on the matter:

WSJ: "...AOL, which is poised to reemerge as an independent entity later this week, albeit in an online world that has passed it by."

AP: "Marriage of old and new media is ending in divorce."

The Hollywood Reporter: "Time Warner is set to spin off AOL this week in a move that finally will undo the much-maligned AOL-TW merger."

Canadian Press has the most interesting take on this:

AOL also is trying to produce online material far more cheaply. It plans to launch dozens of new sites next year and populate much of them with work done by freelancers. These freelancers will be paid by the post - some with a flat rate, some with a share of revenue based on the amount of traffic the post generates.

Read More >

Jobs, jobs, jobs

For some reason media people never want to talk about the elimination of media jobs in economic terms. It is never the fault of the economy, it seems, but of the media business itself.

It is true that the height of media employment (or at least newspaper and magazine employment) seems to have been around 2000 and has declined ever since. But it has really picked up starting in 2007, right around the time the economy started to tank. 

All that prelude is said because today's jobs report is certainly a glimmer of hope -- if not for the media business, at least for the American workforce, in general. Additionally, MediaBistro has a few decent editor positions posted today for some of you to check out. A trend? We can only hope, right?

Tempest in a tea pot

I really hate these kinds of stories. The headline promises something of substance -- New White House pool rotate sparks debate -- something traditional and new media pros can debate, but then the whole thing falls away -- a big mess of innuendo and conjecture.

Read More >

Time previews Sports Illustrated tablet magazine

If you follow MacRumors you know that there has been a lot of discussion about both a new tablet product from Apple, as well as its possible impact on the magazine world.

Now Time has posted a video on YouTube that demonstrates the new Sports Illustrated as seen on a reader:



This is certainly a major step ahead of the traditional "flipbook" solution. What I see, however, is not a magazine solution for the web, but a new way to do web publishing (or at least, tablet/reader publishing).

Magazines and newspapers are dying, right? So the thought is that we need a magic pill that will "save our magazine/newspaper", and that pill will most likely result in some sort of new product -- a tablet/reader version of the magazine, a new web product of some kind.

This is all great. I agree that creating new products for the web or for a reader is a great idea. But that is not the same as saving the magazine -- that is saving jobs, creating a new ancillary product, a new revenue stream. But if the print magazine folds, it folds. There is, in my opinion, no such thing as "going web only". If the magazine folds and a new web presence emerges what you have done is kill one product and create a new one (and to repeat, there is nothing wrong with that). That brings us back to the kinds of arguments that Paul Conley has been making: are print editors really what you need when you create new web products.

OK, so what about tablet readers? and what about what Apple is doing in this area? More to come, for sure.

To read more about Time's prototype, read Peter Kafka's take on this on the All Things Digital page.