US government already in the newspaper bailout business - just ask Donald Graham and the Washington Post Co.

It is not much of a secret that the Washington Post Company has been held aloft by its Kaplan Education Subsidiary. As reported by Bob Garfield for On the Media, 75 percent of the company's profits come from the for-profit education division.

Or at least they used to. With enrollment falling due to the economy, and with government regulators looking into the practices of the industry, the Washington Post's CEO Donald Graham probably has lost a few nights of sleep.
But he should be sleeping like a baby again now that the Department of Education handed down new rules involving the for-profit education industry that were far weaker than those originally proposed. As a result, US tax payers will continue to subsidize his company in a major way.

While the graduation rate at public and private non-profit colleges and universities is 55 percent and 65 percent respectively, the graduation rate at for-profit colleges averages 22 percent, according to a report from The Education Trust (PDF). Additionally, the median debt college students can expect to have after school is an astounding $31,190 – compared to $17,040 for private universities, and $7,960 for public colleges.

But as Katie Leslie of the AJC reported two weeks ago: Students at for-profit institutions represent just 12 percent of all higher education students — but they account for 46 percent of all student loan dollars in default, according to the Department of Education.

(As of last year, for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and DeVry, receive 25 percent of all Pell Grants, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

In essence, the government is taking money away from public education and giving it to corporations like The Washington Post Co. No surprise then that politicians, who covet the support of the media, are continuing to turn a blind eye as companies profit from this redirecting of education funding.

Simply put: there is no need of a bailout for the newspaper industry, they are already getting one.

Condé Nast's Wired tries its hand at the single-sponsored tablet special section app with 'Creating the Nebula'

The special section is still a tried and true method for pumping up ad revenue at many newspapers (and magazines, too). For some smaller publications, the measurement for whether the special section can succeed is judged by how quickly a sales rep can sell the back page ad spot. Think of it as almost the equivalent of the single-sponsor section.

Condé Nast's Wired magazine is experimenting with using the iPad to produce special sections. WIRED Creating the Nebula is a free iPad app that is sponsored by Cadillac. The app description says this app is the first of a four-part series.

Directed and produced by Annaliza Savage, the app is basically a way of presenting a video documentary about artist Reuben Margolin and efforts to build the world's largest moving sculpture.

As a concept for a special section, this app is brilliant: the app itself is simple (overly simple, but we'll get to than in a second), and the single-sponsor method makes it easy to get off the ground. In fact, whether Cadillac is actually paying anything for this is a good question – I could imagine that this might have been thrown into a proposal as an added-value the same way many publishers threw in web advertising as added-value in the bad old days (you don't still do that, do you?).

If there is a problem here it is with the app itself. Since all it is a video player with chapter navigation the quality of the video player is the most important factor in whether this app succeeds. In this regard WIRED Creating the Nebula is about as bad a video vehicle as can be imagined.

First, there are no video player controls, meaning that once the video starts the only way to stop it is to shut down the app. There is no scrubber, no volume controls, and most importantly, no AirPlay capability. The video player can easily be expanded to fill the screen, but that is about it.

The lack of AirPlay and video player controls so astounded me that I felt it important to click on the support page listed in the app description. No surprise I suppose that it took me to the regular Wired app support page, which did not say anything about this new app.

Second, because this app is essentially a video carrier, it weighs in at 501 MB. A few extra megabytes certainly could have been spared to include some text beyond the one paragraph under the information symbol.

Overall this one looks like a rush job, put out there in a hurry to keep a major advertiser happy. But it is free, so readers can't complain – and like I've said, it's a good concept.

DYI app making for publishers choices continues to expand along parallel path to native development

On Wednesday of this week OnSwipe will hold its launch event in New York and one shouldn't be surprised to hear once again that "apps are bullshit" as the company shows off in more detail its "insanely easy tablet publishing" solution.

For print publishers, especially small publishers, the holy grail of tablet publishing is an easy, inexpensive, and brilliant do-it-yourself solution that will allow the publisher to reach iPad owners (and eventually owners of tablets that don't run iOS). But the problem, though, is, and continues to be, that most DYI solutions just do not compare with native apps.

Because of this, most newspaper and magazine publishers who have not built their own development teams have opted to create tablet publications using tools from WoodWing, or Mag+.

The advantage of these solutions is that they can be integrated into the current print production workflow: any art director who is an InDesign expert can work with WoodWing, for instance, to create tablet editions that utilize many of the features of native apps.

Developers, though, look at many of these converted magazines and immediately scoff: 'they're just converted print!' some argue – and they are right. But readers do seem to like these tablet editions; they are easier to read that PDF replica editions, contain more interesting layouts, and often have embedded audio or video content that seems to make them more modern than print.

But there are others who feel even InDesign tools may be too much for them. Bloggers, for instance, may simply be interested in writing and don't want the bother of doing production like a print art director. OnSwipe has a plug-in for WordPress, for instance, that promises to created an "iPad compatible theme", giving the reader a native app feel to a website read through the iPad's browser.

For me, as a former newspaper and magazine publisher, the problem all DYI solutions suffer from is that the end products of each of these solutions tend to look the same. Familiarity with the digital publishing solutions offered by these vendors means that you can spot the vendor used the minute you open up the app. Open the Detroit Free Press mobile app for the first time and one immediately knows what app solution the publisher chose. Getting a vendor to add new iOS features appears to be far easier than getting them to build in customization tools that will help the publisher make their app look less than the other guy's app, and more like something the reader feels comfortable with.

Despite these negatives, and despite sitting in on countless digital publishing webinars, I'm still most interested in finding the right DYI solution for TNM simply because I know that investing in a more expensive, and likely better, solution is simply not going to pay out in the end.

This is probably why the folks behind Inkerro, whoever they are*, have chosen to launch their iPad app using the DYI solutions from Red Foundry. Inkerro Magazine, seen above, is a free app that, once you have played around with the Red Foundry interface a while one can see what choices the publisher decided to make.

It will be interesting to see what OnSwipe unveils on Wednesday, and their bluster of its founder, Jason L. Baptiste will be prove to be well founded, or merely hype. Stay tuned.

* For whatever reason, the publisher behind Inkerro have not included any contact information online, and their app only sends an email to "curious (at) Inkerro.com".

Retweet: Flurry says mobile app usage exceeding desktop web use - a case of apples & oranges?

As an advocate of native app development (as well as innovated web development) I would naturally find this study from Flurry Analytics to be of interest.

In a blog post on their website, the company proclaims that their study shows that consumers are spending more time each day on mobile apps than they are desktop or mobile web browsing. It is a fairly dramatic finding if one were comparing similar things, but I think this is not the case.

Here is a chart from Flurry with their findings - click to go to the blog posting itself:



The problem here is that using a browser is a limited activity - one doesn't play games very often through a browser (though some do) or take panoramic picture, etc.

Mobile apps, however, do a variety of things, including being a substitute for the browser experience. So really this is a case of comparing apples and oranges.

But, and I'm sure this is really the idea behind the study, the growth of mobile app usage is simply astounding, and is all the more amazing when you consider how far we've come in the time since third party app develop started.

Chicago Tribune's first tablet edition debuts; look is consistent with newly unveiled website redesign

It has been a long time coming, but the Chicago Tribune finally has released its first tablet edition, a free app for the iPad.

Chicago Tribune for iPad is a well designed application, even if its overall look is borrowed from its recent ill-conceived website redesign. The look is boxy and simplistic, just like the website, complete devoid of any sense of style and creativity.

The iPad edition is currently sponsored by NorthShore University HealthSystem, and the app description gives no hint that it will eventually require a subscription to access the content. Instead, the app requires you to sign into your current account, sign-in using Google or other methods, or simply create a new account. In this way the Trib is gaining some user information, but no revenue.

As for the app's features, well, they are slim pickings. As you would expect from a native app, rather than a replica edition, the app works well in both portrait and landscape. But the app does not allow for offline reading, making it pretty useless on a plane, and of questionable use on a train. Readers that do not own the 3G model are out of luck as there is no way to download the content for offline reading, a feature that has been a regular part of tablet apps for quite a while now.

The app also doesn't take advantage of push notifications, another feature you would expect from a news app. The weather can no be customized beyond the three choices of Downtown, O'Hare or Midway.

Left: The registration page; Middle: The home page with navigation instructions overlaid on top; Right: a typical story layout.

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Had the Tribune Company released this app a year ago one might have been impressed with its overall usefulness. But we are now in the era of the iPad 2, awaiting the fall release of iOS 5. Offline reading, AirPlay video streaming, push notifications are not just common, but are quickly becoming the norm in news applications.

This first app, if simply a starting point, will work – I can say that much. It opens, it does not crash, and it allows access to the content. But is it really much more useful than the website (which by the way, delivers all its video in Flash, making it useless to iOS device owners)?

Morning Brief: ICANN plans huge expansion of Internet domains; NY Post locks iPad Safari users out of its site

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to increase the number of new website domain suffixes, ending the rigid rule of standard web addresses which current allow for only 22 (such as .com, .net, etc.)
Beginning next year, ICANN will begin accepting applications for new addresses which will allow for addresses to end in any word, in any language.

"Icann has opened the internet's addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination," the BBC reported Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's president and chief executive officer saying. "No one can predict where this historic decision will take us."

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Someone at the New York Post thought this was a great idea: lock out readers who own iPads from accessing their newspaper's website, forcing them to download the app and pay for a subscription, while keeping the website open to all other readers. If you own an iPad, and using Safari surf over to the Post's website you are greeted with this message:

Thanks for coming! NYPOST.com editorial content is now only accessible on the iPad through the New York Post App. If your are a current New York Post App subscriber, please visit the App Store and down the latest version to access NYPOST.com through the INDEX. If you are not a current New York Post App user and would like to subscribe, please download from the App Store. Thank you.

The strategy may be one of the most wrongheaded things done by a newspaper yet. Doing a Google search for news and stumbling upon a story on the NY Post website, one no longer can access the story, redirected to this warning page.

(If you really, really want to read the NY Post you can use any number of other browsers available in the App Store, or even use Safari with JavaScript turned off. But, who would want to bother?)

Will the loss of web traffic be worth the added app downloads? I doubt it, don't you?

In any case, this is the most audacious pay wall yet constructed, though probably the most foolish. Currently the Post is charging $1.99 for its iPhone and iPad apps, then charging a subscription fee of $6.99 per month, or $74.99 per year. If the new strategy works it will certainly upset the common wisdom that web users won't pay for casual access to the news.