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The Orange County News Network, part of San Diego based U.S Local News Network, has been shuttered after only four months.
In an e-mail to staff, obtained by the Orange County Business Journal, Chris Jennewein, president of U.S. Local News Network, said “the Orange County Local News Network has been forced to cease operations effective immediately.”
Back on February 1, sister site CitizenPublishing.net wrote that according to ClickZ, Chris Jennewein, president of San Diego News Network, described Orange County as an "under served market," a remarkable statement considering the presence of the Orange County Register. But the OCR's parent company, Freedom Communications, is currently clawing its way out of bankruptcy court, and their current web site has the word "Beta" as part of the flag.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Orange County News Network is shuttered
Working with the iPad: media consumption "yes"; productivity "no"
My schedule has included very little travel in the past few weeks, and as a result I have not been traveling with my iPad to test it out in the field. As a result, I have experienced media apps more or less in perfect conditions: with an extremely fast Internet connection, at my leisure.
As a media reader there is no doubt that the iPad is best in class. Kindle owners can talk all they want about the e-ink format, but the iPad is no slouch. Early critics -- read "non-owners" -- talked about eye fatigue and the like, but that was just talk.
But out in the field the iPad does present some challenges for those wishing to consume their media on the tablet. First there is the challenge of downloading media. Just because it is a tablet does not mean that secure, fast Internet connections will appear out of thin air. The airport is, and remains, a hit or miss situation. What might appear as a good 3G signal can just as easily be a phantom.
Because of this, good planning is essential. Yesterday, using PressReader, I downloaded the Sunday editions of the Observer and the WaPo. Since PressReader can be used offline, all was well at the airport and in the air. Unfortunately, I had failed to remember to download my Monday edition of Sporting News Today. A masochistic streak compelled me to read about the Sharks latest collapse. I suppose it is just as well that the connection prevented me from completing the download by boarding time.
While in the air my iPad caught the attention of a fellow passenger who demanded a demonstration. I opened the Vanity Fair app to show off the two versions: the landscape just-like-print version, and the portrait tablet version. But I forgot that they ads in the portrait version required a live Internet connection to view the added video content. Big fail.
As a productivity tool the iPad is challenging. For media folk, the biggest drawback is the inability to work effectively online or within content management systems. The problem is the keyboard.
It is not that typing is slow using the touchscreen keyboard -- people get used to it, and besides, speed isn't everything -- but the problem is navigation. Without a mouse, it is extremely slow and difficult to edit.
The solution is a wireless keyboard, of course. I carried around the Apple wireless keyboard -- a perfect match. But the problems for reporters, editors and bloggers extend beyond the keyboard. Picture editing on the iPad is possible, but not as efficient as on a laptop or desktop. For many media writers who simply input copy and leave the rest to others, this won't present a problem. But I like to make sure the images here are properlu sized, and often I use tables within posts.
So here is the bottom line: if you a consumer of media the iPad is without a challenger, but media is still best consumed with online. Buy the 3G version, jailbreak your iPhone, or tether your iPad to a non-AT&T phone.
If you are a member of the press: practice using the iPad before venturing out. Even with an external keyboard, the iPad can not compare to a laptop with a mouse.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Leaving the laptop at home: on the road with iPad
Posting will be light today and tomorrow as I travel to the West Coast. I've decided to leave the laptop at home and make due with just my phone and iPad. It will be interesting to see this will be enough firepower.
I already know from experience that Blogger does not play nice with Apple's mobile version of Safari -- either on the iPhone or iPad -- so I'm taking along a wireless keyboard (have to have those arrows).
Foreign publications take advantage of two month gap to develop their own apps: Les Echos for the iPad
The Apple iPad was launched stateside on April 3rd. For two months buyers in other countries have had to either travel to the U.S. to buy an iPad (and then experience the frustration of not being to access apps back home) or else wait for Apple to launch the tablet in their country. But now Apple will be launching the iPad in eight additional countries later this week and publishers overseas have been used the time between the U.S. launch and now to develop their news apps.
(I'm not thrilled using the term "foreign publications", after all, in the short time this site has been live, TNM has been accessed by readers from 79 different countries. What may be a foreign newspapers to one reader, is, of course, a local newspaper to another.)
One paper that is ready to go is Les Échos, the financial daily newspaper from France. Their free iPad app appeared in iTunes late Friday, and as you might expect, has not seen any reviews to date.
The app works wonderfully, as you might expect, as the company had added time to work on design, navigation and implementation.
Navigation can be accomplished through a drop down index on the left, or the reader can simply swipe pages as if it were a flipbook. A tap of an individual story, however, brings up a new window with a text version of the story. Again, though, the reader has the choice of using multi-touch gestures to zoom into the print version. I like choice. (This flipbook approach, of course, allows all the ads to be seen. The ads, as far as I can see, currently do not have any embedded content such as links or video.)
One final touch made me smile: one of the bottom navigation options is Écouter Radio Classique, which when pressed gives you classical music to accompany your business reading.
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NewspaperDirect may find new life with iPad app
If magazine lovers have the Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader to bring them many of their favorite magazines, then newspaper readers may want to download PressReader to access their many of their favorite newspapers.
PressReader is the newspaper stand application from NewspaperDirect, the Canadian company that has been bringing electronic editions of newspapers to readers since 1999.
The company's online kiosk, PressDisplay.com makes newspapers available to web readers in a typical flipbook format.
The associated iPad app, PressReader, brings this same technology to the tablet, where it may find the kind of success missing from the online version. The reason for this is simple: the tablet appears to be a leisure-time reading device, whereas browsing on a typical computer is a search-and-find activity.
“At last, readers can hold a digital edition in their hands and read it from front to back, just the way the title was printed — with no compromises in quality, fidelity or content. With PressReader, the Apple iPad is truly the breakthrough product publishers and readers have been waiting for, said Alex Kroogman, CEO of NewspaperDirect in their launch announcement.
As I wrote last week, the recent ChangeWave Research study of e-reader users found that iPad owners are more likely to be requesting newspaper and magazine content -- with 50 percent of iPad owners reading newspapers with their devices. No surprise, really, since the device is much more flexible to different formats that devices like the Kindle
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Middle: Canadian newspapers; Right: making a selection.
NewspaperDirect is offering the PressReader app for free, and the first seven titles downloaded will be free, as well. After the free trial period, newspapers and magazines (there are a few) will be available for 99 cents per issue, or can be downloaded as part of a paid subscription acquired through PressDisplay.com
The experience of reading a newspaper on the app is far inferior to the new apps coming online, so newspaper publishers developing applications for their own titles will not see PressReader as a permanent solution. The problem, of course, is that the app simply attempts to duplicate the print experience, much as a flipbook does online. As I have said before, however, the flipbook experience is not a good solution for the web -- but for tablets maybe.
An individual app, complete with multimedia and constantly updated content, is definitely the future. The Financial Times app, for instance, is for more attractive, easier to read, and provides readers with a more, dare I say, modern version of the tablet newspaper than a simple exact copy approach as employed by NewspaperDirect.
But as a newsstand, and as a way to quickly access a newspaper while on the run, about to board a plane, PressReader will prove to be a winner.
Morning Brief: AT&T ups termination fee; Apple prepares to ship international orders
They must know something you don't know.
AT&T must believe that they are about to lose their iPhone exclusivity because they have announced that they will be raising the early termination fee on smartphone users to $325.
The move is also a sign that AT&T wants to take advantage of customers who will soon want to upgrade their iPhones. Apple is set to unveil its newest generation of the iPhone at its developer conference in two weeks.
This is the week Apple launches the iPad in nine more countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K. (guess they are out of luck in Liechtenstein).
In preparation, Apple has opened up its international iBookstore and iTunes app store for the iPad. Previously, a non-U.S. resident that may have purchased their iPad in the U.S. and then travelled home to their home country was prevented from accessing iPad apps via iTunes. As a result, news apps from countries other than the U.S. are beginning to appear such as the BFMTV app from France -- logo seen at right.
One app that submitted an update in time for the international roll-out was Zinio whose Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader is probably the most way iPad readers access magazines -- the alternative being individual apps. Their update initially appeared minor, just support for French, but a closer look reveals that users will now be able to delete titles completely, something impossible with earlier versions. This is probably not important online, but iPad users have asked for the delete feature so they do not have to swipe through pages of icons to find their magazines (extra important when you are subscribing to a daily product like Sporting News Today. Another good update for the leading magazine newsstand app.
