Rockfish Interactive creates iPad app for weekly hobbyist publication Coin World with two in-app purchase options

After looking at lots of replica editions of magazines, or those God-awful flipbooks that newspaper publishers can't seem to get enough of, one feel completely without hope that their are creative publishers left in our industry. Then a last minute check of the App Store veals a diamond in the rough.

Amos Press has released a very nice tablet edition for its publication Coin World. Coin World is a weekly publication for coin collectors and the publisher maintains an interesting website chock full of medium rectangle ads (makes a publisher very happy).

That same website was prepared for the appearance of the new app in Apple's App Store because right there on the homepage is an ad for the new iPad app that takes you to a whole new section of the site to explain the app.

As for the app itself, Coin World for iPad is not just a free way to access the editorial content of the publication or website. Instead, the publisher has thought through what they wanted to offer users, and how they would justify the cost of producing the app. In fact, the editorial content is probably the least interesting part of the app. The articles appear using cover flow, familiar to iTunes users.

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Left: the cover flow way of accessing articles; Right: the in-app purchase prompt for Coin Values.

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The real meat of the app are the non-editorial features: the dealer locator, essentially a directory of dealers; the Marketplace where readers can browse through coins and make purchases by bringing up the browser; an events calendar, another database driven features; a coin value feature which is a $4.99 in-app purchase; something called Making the Grade, a guide to rare coins which is a $9.99 in-app purchase.

Of course, something like this takes some real development work. In this case, Amos Press worked with Rockfish Interactive to create the app. The interactive marketing company, headquartered in Rogers, Arkansas, has created mobile apps for Sam's Club and CouponFactory (though the geolocation coupon app has not made it into the App Store quite yet).

Retweet: SAY Media and the contrast with old media

Dan Frommer of Business Insider has a story this afternoon about SAY Media, predicting that the company will soon makes its first acquisition. The company here, SAY, offers a good window into the starkly different worlds of new media versus old.

SAY Media is the new name applied to the merged companies VideoEgg and Six Apart. I noticed VideoEgg after they had put their software solution on AOL, allowing AOL users to upload their videos for sharing much like YouTube. From AOL's perspective I'm sure that it was a good way to get in the game of video sharing.

At the time VideoEgg was getting going, 2005, I was working for a Chicago-based online video company – having joined precisely because it was a start-up and because, well, how many online video companies are based in Chicago, this sounded exciting (it wasn't).

My job was to get advertisers interested in our video content. The problem was that no one was watching our video content because the company did not promote its website which hosted the content. As a result, we had no answer to the very first question out of a customer's mouth: how many people will see my ad?

I immediately knew that the first thing we needed to do was get an audience, and the best was to do this was to have our content shown on other people's sites. Enter VideoEgg. They were getting content from those who were uploading their personal videos, maybe they would be interested our content, professional made short videos on topics such as gourmet cooking?

So off to the West Coast I went, to the funky South of Market office that is still their home.

I was sick as a dog that day when I met with the team. It had been ten years since I left San Francisco, and it took me maybe five minutes to realize that I had completely misunderstood the company, I was thinking like a Midwestern working for an old media company rather than thinking about it from a New Media perspective. To me, VideoEgg was a software company, providing AOL and other companies with video software solutions. To VideoEgg, they were a media company trying to build an audience.

The meeting took place in a small, cramped conference room with this large group of people there. Why were all these folks in this meeting, wasn't I just meeting with Matt Sanchez (the current CEO of SAY Media)? No, all these folks had an interest in VideoEgg being a success. If they succeeded all of them would be millionaires.

I left the meeting a bit depressed, and not just because I wasn't feeling well. I was working my butt off trying to get other companies to host our content, but I was also fighting a losing battle back at the home office trying to make their owner of the company understand that content is without any value whatsoever if no one sees it. He simply didn't get it. Further, he insisted that he would decide what the content would be that would be produced, on the content partners I was trying to line-up. Conflict ensued and eventually I was out of there.

For VideoEgg, their model was typical New Media: we'll give away our software solution so that lots of websites will be able to host video. We'll then sell that audience to advertisers. That business is currently driving big dollars. For the customers like AOL, the business proposition was simple: this is FREE, you might even get a share of the revenue, and the content is all yours.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the old media video folk are still, six years later, still trying to get other companies to host their content. Their proposition is also simple: its our content, you have no say, we'll sell the ads, get the revenue, and you might be able drive some additional traffic, though all that traffic will be diverted back to our channels.

The lesson for old media companies that I took out of the experience was this: don't fall in love with your own content, the value lies in the audience, and include your team, not just your managers in meetings and strategy sessions. But most importantly, have a strategy that builds revenue, and build the company and the products around that strategy (as opposed to creating a product that trying to figure out a strategy to make that product successful).

What really impressed me about VideoEgg, back in 2005, was that it was a sales driven company that wanted to aggregate an audience, and it knew how to monetize that audience.

RSS driven news apps: Deseret News launches universal app; The Ottawa Herald, circulation 5,400, gets its very own iPad app

The RSS driven app is the bread and butter of newspaper app. Stories are fed into the content management system, properly tagged, and then can be spit out into a mobile or tablet application. Whether it is the New York Times, or Talking New Media, everything revolves around those RSS feeds when it comes to app development because very few apps are built like a magazine – The Daily's app being a good example of a newspaper iPad app looking more like a magazine.

The Desert News, the daily newspaper associated with the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has released a universal app that, while driven by RSS feeds, has unique enough layouts for both the iPhone and iPad that one might think these were completely separate applications.

The iPad version seen here works in both portrait and landscape. The portrait layout works a bit better as the copy fills the display screen. In landscape the app layout has a hole in the upper right hand corner (maybe an update could fill this spot with an ad).

The app is not filled with many bells and whistles: I did not detect that the app will be using push notifications to alert readers to breaking news, for instance. Readers can, however, share stories through Twitter, Facebook and email.

One of the few features to assist readers is a font size adjustment tool which is much needed as the default font size, especially on the front page, is too small.

The problem with RSS driven apps, of course, is that an RSS feed does not sort stories by order of importance but by time of posting. It is the biggest issue bloggers face (and one I'm working to solve here).

The biggest issue with this particular app, however, is the apparent lack of a business model. The app is free to download, and once installed the reader has complete access to the content without even having to register. There are also no ad spots in this version of the app making one wonder if the publisher considers the new app simply a marketing piece for the brand.

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The Ottawa Herald, circulation around 5,400 (I found conflicting figures online), is the latest newspaper to have its own branded iPad app appear in the App Store.

Created by its parent, Harris Enterprises, The Ottawa Herald is also an RSS feed driven app though without the more complex layout found in the Deseret News app.

Gordon Billingsley, digital media director at the paper, told me that this is the second app to appear from the company – Salina Journal being the first. The apps are identical, though in the Salina Journal app you can see that the bottom banner is meant to be an ad position.

The advantage of RSS feeds is that each paper can customize their app by including some feeds, but not others. The Salina Journal app features News first, then Obituaries, Sports and then SalinaFYI. Obituaries are obviously important in Salina!

The Ottawa Herald app contains no separate sports feed, an unusual decision since this is prominent tab on the newspaper's website.

The news layouts are completely without graphics, something that I would hope would be corrected in an update. There is a photo feed, however, that does contain a bit of programming: the picture comes up without a cutline, but tapping the photo will bring up some text. Line break coding frequently appears here, so the editors will have to be careful to monitor this.

Releasing an iPad app for such a small circulation newspaper is an interesting endeavor, but it shows that even small newspapers can publish tablet editions if they can do the work themselves and limit their development costs.

Most newspapers are still struggling with the basics of web publishing: Chronicle series lack interactive features

This year marks the 105th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. 105 is not a nice round number, but for the citizens of San Francisco, the earthquake of that year will never be ancient, irrelevant history.

Having lived through the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, known now as the World Series quake, I can say that the specter of '06 always lingers. Back in '89 I was working for a Bay Area daily and the quake was a quick reminder that newspapers were pretty irrelevant compared to broadcast mediums. The reporters and editors left our building when the power went out and headed to a local bar which still had power in order to watch the television coverage of the quake. Things would have been quite different had the paper a web site to maintain.

To commemorate the '06 quake, the San Francisco Chronicle published a two part series of excerpts from the manuscript of Dr. Leonie von Zesch, who was 23 at the time of the great quake. Her manuscript was found in some boxes that were stored after her death in 1944.

The online version of the two articles that appeared on Sunday and this morning in the print edition of the newspaper simply replicate the print versions. Five photos can be found online, but other than those photos no additional work was put into the digital versions of the stories.

For me, this partially explains the Chronicle's continued backwardness with all things digital. Here they had an incredible opportunity to use the power of digital publishing to create an interesting package. At the very least, the use of an interactive map would have shown the home of Von Zesch and the locations mentioned in the two excerpts.

Until the Chronicle starts taking its online editorial content seriously it is not hard to see that moving towards a legitimate mobile or tablet publishing strategy would be a waste of time (one would guess that creating a flipbook would be all we could expect from the paper at this time).

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The Chronicle's situation is, sadly, not unique. While editors spent lots of time trying to piece together packages for their print editions, very little effort is spent on the online opportunities.

Obviously, the one newspaper property that usually is the exception is the New York Times. Their digital team time after time produces interesting and highly informative interactive features. While it might be near impossible for other papers to replicate these efforts, those features that are part of the Sunday newspaper package are different – more time is available to the editors, and the online team (if one exists) should be able to add to the reader experience.

This is all so nineties, yet here we are are on 2011 still with newspapers struggling with the basics. It is not just a reengineered newsroom that is necessary, but a whole new management attitude towards digital publishing that is required.

April in Chicago: this just isn't right!

Welcome to Spring in Chicago. April 18 and there is snow on the ground this morning. This just isn't right – the baseball season is in its third week of play, and isn't Memorial Day right around the corner?

Oh well, this is what you get for moving from the west coast: endless winter, followed by the mosquito season.

On the bright side, I'm sure the farmers here in the Midwest love all this precipitation, as long as it stops at some point, I suppose.

Anyways, that's your weather for this morning, hopefully we won't be doing this too often over the next few weeks.

Then again, the tornado season is right around the corner. Ah, the Midwest!

Morning Brief: UK MP worries that gagging orders are hampering investigative journalists; coordinating marketing for a media app launch a challenge

The Guardian today published a story this morning about the concerns of Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, John Hemming, who is concerned that a new type of gagging order being used by UK courts will interfere with investigative journalism. "This goes a step further than preventing people speaking out against injustice," Hemming is quoted in The Guardian story (which first appeared Sunday online).

The Guardian used as an example of this new type of press restriction the "superinjunction against the Guardian to suppress a leaked report on its toxic waste dumping, which even prevented reporting proceedings in parliament," the article states.

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One of the problems publishers face when launching new media apps is knowing exactly when their apps will appear inside the App Store. Unless you are launching a major app and working very closely with Apple your app will simply have to go through the app review team's system and then ... well, you'll have to be patient.

That doesn't mean the process drags out – despite some horror stories from individual developers and apps – the process has a logical sequence of events: after completing the online forms one submits their app, the app gets reviewed and is then approved or rejected. If rejected one can then appeal. For a "typical" app the process takes a couple of days, if rejected an appeal can take only a few more days unless there are issues with the programming or content

The problem comes in coordinating publicity with launch. Take this app from the Dow Jones Local Media group – SouthCoastToday Pix. It is the second iPad photography app released by the group, the first was CapeCodOnline Pix App (not a great name, was it?).

Released in the App Store on April 8, the press release that got my attention was released on the 16th, a Saturday. The press release contained no link to the app (that would only be known once it is actually in the App Store) and the only clue as to where to find the app was a link back to the SouthCoastToday website which was, at I write this, dead.

The app can be found under News, but the first page of the free news apps only goes back to the 13th, meaning that the app dropped off the first page severa days ago. The other choice as the main category would have photography. As of the time I am writing this post, the oldest app on the first page of free apps was released on the 4th, so if the app have used this category it would spend more time being visible, something to keep in mind when picking your categories.

As for the app itself, I like the idea – it is a great way to reward your photographers, get readers to contribute (if you include a mechanism for reader contributions). I found the app a bit sluggish, but my biggest gripe with the app was actually the photography. I opened the app and was immediately presented with photos from a family funeral, a stunning intrusion of privacy I thought. The description gave no reason why this private moment of brief was important for the general public to observe.

I deleted the app immediately after grabbing the first non-funeral picture I could find.