Pre game analysis: what if the Apple tablet is a dud and has no effect on the media world?

I don't know if you have even been in competitive sports -- in my youth I was quite a sports nut -- but there are two schools of thought concerning how to prepare for the Big Game. Common wisdom holds that you should visualize success, see yourself making all the right moves and winning the game -- the power of positive thinking. My brother-in-law told me that many athletes visualize losing the game and use the fear of failure to spur you on -- the power of total fear. Needless to say, my brother-in-law never wrote any self-help books, and I don't think he actually was advocating the power of negative thinking.

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If the tablet strategy fails, is this the end of the line for print media industry? Probably not.   ☞

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But I was reading some comments from a publishing executive last week who seemed to think the introduction today of Apple's tablet would have zero effect on their business. I don't remember the quote and let it slip from my mind until this morning when I thought about this issue: what if the Apple tablet becomes just another electronic toy, nothing more than another way to listen to music and watch YouTube videos?

Then there is the concern that it will be publishers that let down the revolution. Jason Kincaid is certainly worried about it: "My concern is not that Apple will fail to deliver; I have little doubt that their product launch tomorrow will be stellar. My doubts lie with the content providers themselves," Kincaid writes on TechCrunch.

One could argue that the world of print media will just go on -- certainly that was the opinion of that publishing exec. Come Thursday, if this view is correct, we will all be back to discussing the world of publishing as if nothing new occurred, and the future path of the industry remains on its current course.

But what is that course? The major players in the trade press, Reed and Nielsen, are unloading their properties and writers are contemplating a world without many B2B magazines, wondering what that says about the industry as a whole. "Perhaps the bigger issue here is if major players like Nielsen and RBI are moving away from magazine publishing, then what, if anything, does that say about the sustainability and the future of the business for the rest of us?" wrote Jason Fell on the Folio: web site.

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☜  The magazine I launched while at McGraw-Hill, a success from Day One, but folded by the company soon after I left the company.

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I'm not a big believer in black and white answers to business issues. That is, just as I can see the value of pay walls in some circumstances, I also agree with those who feel that, in general, web users are going to migrate to free content over paid.

So on the issue of whether the trade press, and possibly newspapers, are on the way out unless a savior like Steve Jobs creates a groundbreaking product my views are not absolute.  The book form has survived for hundreds of years after all, so there is no reason to believe that printed newspaper and magazine won't do the same. But from this chair it certainly doesn't look like the kind of business I would want to be in (leaving New Media out of the equation).

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Would it be rubbing it? But I just can't resist!

See! Pay walls work, they are the new model!

OK, I'll control myself. But, really, this story is just too funny:

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall . . . So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?  The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

What does this prove? Nothing actually. I am not totally against the idea of pay walls, but am still a skeptic. I can see where a paper as strong and valuable as the New York Times could launch a limited pay wall and get away with it, but can you put up a paywall on newsday.com and expect to rake it in? Of course not.

My only question is this: who are these 35 people? do they feel a little ripped off? are they all named Dolan?

Without scale new Apple tablet can not lead the mobile revolution, can only be a bit player

Not too many companies would schedule a major product introduction on the same day as the President's SOTU speech, but I don't think Steve Jobs is sweating it.

So rather than post a series of stories on the last of the tablet rumors, I've decided to post one story and update it throughout the day.

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First thought: scale. Apple may produce the coolest smart phone, and have a dedicated consumer base of Mac fanboys, but Apple's market share is still dwarfed by Microsoft (OS) and the the major computer manufacturers. Even its iPhone, while a major player as a brand, still only has a less than 30% share of the smart phone business -- smaller still when considering all cell phone sales, of course.

This doesn't concern Apple in the least because they don't operate as a mass market company the way Dell or Microsoft does. Apple likes to be a market leader in certain select areas, and maintains nice margins. Microsoft may think it was smart when it produced their Laptop Hunter ads, but Apple must have smiled knowing that positioning themselves as the Nordstrom in a world of Kmarts was perfectly all right with them.

But there is one area where Apple has achieved scale: the iTunes store. The iTunes store changed the way people consume music. Apple did not invent digital downloads, far from it, but the iTunes store was the perfect answer at the perfect time for music labels fearful of the growth of illegal downloads. How can EMI compete with Napster and Bit Torrent? Why not create a legal download service?

Apple likes to point to the iPod as a transformative product, but the mp3 player existed before Apple introduced the iPod, but the combination of a cool new device with a way to buy content . . . The Perfect Thing.

So Wednesday Apple is set to do for publishing what it did for music? Apple as the savior of American (and World) publishing?

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Guardian editor Rusbridger warns against "turning away from a world of openly shared content"

Alan Rusbridger, executive editor of The Guardian delivered his arguments against deploying pay walls as he delivered the Annual Hugh Cudlipp Lecture at the London College of Communication.  "As an editor, I worry about how a universal pay wall would change the way we do our journalism," said Rusbridger.

His speech stood in sharp contrast to the views expressed by Rupert Murdoch during his famous Sky News interview where he advocated erecting pay walls for his publications.

I would recommend reading the entire lecture as I think it was well reasoned and, I believe, presents the free web content argument well.  Rusbridger does not, however, necessarily reject the concept of pay walls so much as conclude that the models do not work for The Guardian.

"My commercial colleagues at the Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – are very focused on that, want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and can't presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content," Rusbridger said.

"They've done lots of modeling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded. They're looked at the argument that free digital content cannibalizes print – and they look at the ABC charts showing that our market share of paid-for print sales is growing, not shrinking, despite pushing aggressively ahead on digital. They don't rule anything out. But they don't think it's right for us now."

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Aggregators aggregating the aggregators

I can't help but laugh at the number of aggregators that have sprung up. An aggregator, of course, searches the web for relevant content and links to it, often without adding more content or commenting on the original post.

There is nothing wrong with aggregation -- in fact, I think it still needs to grow, but more on that in the days to come.  But there is such a thing as bad aggregation: that is when one either 1) grabs a large amount of the content simply to populate their own site; or 2) wrongly identifies the original source of the material by linking to a secondary source.

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Design must make a resurgence as print publishers move to mobile media production

Art directors: under appreciated, under paid, and probably under trained will be one of the keys to leading your publications in the soon to emerge mobile and tablet publications industry.  This post talks about multimedia, tablet/reader products, collaborative publishing and Flyp.

I have only one thing to say about the web design produced by print publishers: yuck.

OK, I'm exaggerating. Maybe.

The work I like best right now is not even being seen by the public -- it can be seen, however, in the video publishers and creative labs have been producing to demonstrate that they are ready for tablets and e-readers (and can be seen here under "favorites").  Another example is the work being done at Flyp Media.

An article written by Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on the Online Journalism Blog is surprisingly positive about Flyp's approach, despite a headline that proclaims "Flyp Media: where the medium is the message".  Flyp's design, while unfortunately incorporating the cliched page turning swishing sound that really needs to go away, is a tour de force of multimedia publishing.

At first, after viewing a story I wanted to be negative -- this is just a flip book, right?

No. Look a little deeper and you will see that this is an online native publication -- not the first, but certainly one of the few that takes into account the fact that the online reading experience is vastly different than the print environment.

In an interview for Media Shift, Jim Gaines, editor in chief, is confident that people will pay for the new multimedia magazines. "People will pay for this. If you had told me as a kid that people would pay for water, I would have told you that you were nuts. The same with coffee. Clearly there was a need I did not perceive in Starbucks. People will pay for what they want. "

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