World Press Photo releases tablet edition of its photo contest winners into the App Store

Each year World Press Photo, an independent, nonprofit organization based in Amsterdam, founded in 1955, releases a yearbook of photo contest winners. This year the book costs 24.00 € on the organization's website bookstore, and is available in seven languages.

Currently in the Amazon.com online bookstore the 2011 edition is being offered for pre-order at a discounted price. The site says the book will be available on June 30th.

But late last week World Press Photo released an app version of the book, available for download for $4.99 in the App Store. The app, 2011 World Press Photo Contest, presents to readers all the award-winning photos from the contest, photographer biographies and camera details.

The jury of the 54th World Press Photo Contest, chronicled in the print book and tablet app, selected a photograph by the South African photographer Jodi Bieber as the World Press Photo of the Year 2010. The photo had first appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in the August 9, 2010 edition.

Her winning picture shows Bibi Aisha, 18, who was disfigured as retribution for fleeing her husband's house in Oruzgan province, in the center of Afghanistan. At the age of 12, Aisha and her younger sister had been given to the family of a Taliban fighter under a Pashtun tribal custom for settling disputes. When she reached puberty she was married to him, but she later returned to her parents' home, complaining of violent treatment by her in-laws. – World Press Photo website description of the winning photograph by Jodi Bieber.

The app weighs in at 263MB and contains all the material. The book has been converted for the iPad so that the reader can use the app in both portrait and landscape.

As photography renders exceptionally well on the iPad, the tablet edition of this book may well become the preferred platform for many readers.

Zillow reports that 28.4% of all single-family homes with mortgages are under water due to lower home values

About four years ago my family went on a short trip with another family to do a little spring skiing. At dinner one night I had a discussion with someone about the deteriorating home market, repeating something I had read in the WSJ about the number of homes then in default (late on a mortgage payment, but not in foreclosure). For some reason the person I was speaking to thought I was just making up the numbers, things couldn't be that bad, could they?

Today, however, Zillow has reported that things are, indeed, that bad. According to the online real estate information company, 28.4 percent of all U.S. homes with mortgages currently have negative equity – that is, are worth less than the total amount outstanding on the mortgage. It is simply an astonishing number, and along with continuing high unemployment, one of the reasons the U.S. economy continues to under perform.

Things are not much better on the foreclosure front, either. According to Zillow, in March "one out of every 1,000 homes in the country was lost to foreclosure."

"Home value declines are currently equal to those we experienced during the darkest days of the housing recession. With accelerating declines during the first quarter, it is unreasonable to expect home values to return to stability by the end of 2011," said Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries.

According to Zillow's report, the Phoenix area is suffering the worst, with 68.4 percent of all homes with negative equity. Tampa is at 59.8 percent, Atlanta at 55.7 percent, and Sacramento at 51.2 percent.

$299.99 for an iPad app? Construction Centrics launches pricey family of applications for the construction industry

I download a great number of apps in the course of the week, deleting most of them after briefly looking at them, and maybe writing about them here. But here is one app that I really can not afford to download, Construction Superintendent – Journeyman, a three hundred dollar app just released last week into the App Store.

The app was released by Construction Centrics LLC, a company out of Chesterfield, Missouri. The company's website doesn't reveal very much about the company other than the fact that they seem to be only developing for the iPad and that they have plans for a second app, Construction Superintendent – Professional. Most of the website is under construction, not a good sign for anyone doing a little investigation of the company prior to buying (and I would guess that a $299.99 app isn't one of those impulse buys, right?).

But before one dismisses this as some sort of scam one must remember that the construction industry lends itself to high priced tools. While at McGraw-Hill a subscription to my newspaper, the Daily Pacific Builder, was always over $1500 a year thanks to the bidding information that could be found within it. Additionally, estimating and bidding software, as well as project management software has always been expensive.

So assuming that this new company's tools for the iPad are legit (and there is no way for me to test them myself) then Construction Centrics is simply the latest company to enter the technology field with project management tools for contractors — only this time for those using iPads.

Condé Nast updates its The New Yorker Magazine iPad app, introducing discounted in-app subscriptions, as well as free access for print magazine subscribers

The New Yorker, like other Condé Nast magazines with iPad apps, has issued an update this morning which will now allow readers to subscribe to the tablet edition from within the app, as well as allow print subscribers to sign into the accounts to access the issues for free.

The editors of the magazine posted an alert on the magazine's website informing readers of the updated app.

The last time we addressed you was to announce that The New Yorker would be available on the iPad—every Monday, wherever you happened to be. The reaction to our iPad app was instructive. Readers generally found it easy to use and beautiful to look at; they were delighted to know that they could get the magazine instantly, without thought to distance.

They were less delighted about one important point: they wanted to subscribe to the magazine on the iPad or to get access to their subscription if they had one already; until now, the only way to read the magazine on the iPad was to buy single issues, at single-issue prices.

The app itself, The New Yorker Magazine, remains a free download. The app opens up to the library allowing readers to buy individual issues for $4.99, or two subscription offers – $5.99 for one month, or $59.99 per year. (The New Yorker, of course, is a monthly magazine, producing 47 issues in a year.)

With the adoption of Apple's in-app subscription model, The New Yorker has also changed the way it will offer print subscriptions. The magazine's website now touts print plus digital access subscriptions. To get a new subscription to the magazine one would now pay $69.99 for an annual subscription, but this price would now include access to the iPad edition and the website.

Some media writers have said that the new app changes from major publishers such as Condé Nast represents a move towards the way Apple would like to see things. But really this is just giving the reader what the reader has been demanding all along: the same sorts of discounts for digital that publishers have been offering print readers for years. From this perspective, it is pretty clear that Apple was far more tuned into what media customers were saying than the publishers were. In the end it pays to read those negative App Store reviews and to not dismiss them out of hand.

SFGate.com paywall goes up, proves leaky, irritating

It is sometimes a bit too easy to laugh about some of my experiences at Hearst Newspapers, the place I first entered the newspaper business professionally: I recall the effort to create a tabloid newspaper in Los Angeles, all the better to attract subway riders (L.A. had no subway); or the all-color Sunday edition, printed on a brand new press, so beautiful that it scared the heck out of management, forcing them to quickly dump the project lest the company be forced to actually buy new presses to produce the gorgeous paper for real (I was able to snag a copy before they were burned, it really was beautiful).

Now the management at Hearst has installed a paywall at its premier newspaper website, SFGate.com. I call it their "premier" not so much because of its design (it is still lacking there) but because it continues to be a top news site based on traffic, consistently in the top ten in traffic among US news sites.

It's not much of a paywall. In fact, one has to stumble onto it by accident, clicking on one of the stories that are actually behind it. For instance, I couldn't find a news story behind the paywall on the site's front news section, but found one in the Sports section. As you can see, if you aren't willing to pay for access to the e-edition you'll have to wait until Wednesday to read this minor little backgrounder about a 49er draft choice.

The rumor hit last month that Hearst was about to construct a paywall for SFGate.com. I ignored the story at the time – I guess I've learned my lessons over time in regard to Hearst Newspapers. Here we have a newspaper publishing company headquartered in New York City, and a major newspaper in San Francisco. Put the two together and you would think that Hearst Newspapers would be a leader in New Media. Well, you'd think so.

During my tenure at Hearst, admittedly a while ago now, I found the company to be too NY oriented – it never seemed to understand California and its California properties. At my daily in Los Angeles, we were on the two year plan: every two years a new publisher was brought in from New York. After two years, about the time it took for the new publisher to begin to understand the market, a new one would be brought in again. (Eventually the ad director told me that I would be wise to accept the offer I received from Copley Newspapers. Three years later the paper was closed down by Hearst.)

Now Hearst has instituted a leaky paywall in San Francisco and supposedly has plans to launch a tablet edition for the Chronicle, as well.

Well, we'll see how this all works out. But it seems to me the company would be well served to simply establish a new headquarters for Hearst Newspapers – get out of NYC and move to the West Coast. Do what Facebook did: buy a place in Palo Alto and start fresh. Well, that's my advice anyway.

Advertising on tablets, trust but verify; while publishers tout new combined audits, marketers express doubts

The topic of advertising on tablets is heating up because of changes publishers are making to their circulation claims, assisted by rule changes at the ABC and BPA. Publishers have always been eager to take advantage of their digital readership by lumping them in with print circulation numbers, and now that the audit bureaus, stung by declining numbers themselves, have signed on to their member's views, suddenly some publications have been able to report surging growth in the number of readers they are reaching. But many advertisers and their agencies are not buying it.

At stake here is the value of an ABC or BPA audit, and the truth is that the value will continue to decline if publishers and the audit bureaus continue to create doubt in the minds of the advertising community that publishers are dealing with them straight.

But, of course, much of the publishing community haven't been playing it straight of years. While many of my fellow publishers will no doubt not appreciate my point of view, it is a sad fact that far too many publishing firms have been playing fast and loose with their numbers for years.

In the past decade I have worked at several media firms that were being less than totally honest with the advertisers concerning the number and quality of the readers they would reach by placing an ad with a particular magazine. One firm simply made up the numbers, something that is easily done because none of their books were audited. At another, the circulation director stopped qualifying any readers at all on unaudited magazines – not surprisingly those books were losing advertisers left and right. This same circulation director was also in charge of supplying web reader numbers: those numbers appeared to have been drawn out of a hat, leading to widespread skepticism by the publishers and sales reps. In the end, few wanted to sell digital.

But the audit has always been a point of differentiation: audited books were trusted by both advertiser and agency alike, and so the cost to audit was deemed worth it for publishers wishing to attract grade A advertisers. But as David Carr of the NYT wrote this weekend, agencies are starting to balk at the notion that the numbers being presented to them are automatically valid. Told that digital readership numbers can count as part of the rate base, some media buyers are hesitating. Both Carr and Adweek's Lucia Moses quote from a letter sent by MediaVest’s Robin Steinberg to publishers warning them that they will need to provide verification for their new combined numbers, and proving that their digital readers are engaging with their products.

“We don't believe digital copies should automatically count,” Steinberg is quoted in the Adweek storty. “We need to know what the value is. We need additional information on who received it, did they open it, how long did they spend with it.”

For new digital publishing start-ups this may prove to be good news. If the marketing claims being thrown around by traditional media companies are going to get scrutinized very closely then it means that start-ups will simply be in the same boat as the big guys – after all, we all knew that the numbers claimed by new media companies would be received skeptically, now at least one agency in on record as saying that they won't just automatically give a pass to the traditional media guys.