The Denver Post releases an iPad edition of its Ski Guide; native tablet page designs and features, a first for a company previously dependent on third party vendors

This post has been updated here. The update contains important background information on the creation of the Ski Guide, as well as where the Post team hopes to go from here.

Sometimes a wonderful new tablet edition comes out of nowhere – sometimes the app grabs your attention because of its features and design, sometimes because it comes from an unexpected source.

Denver Post Colorado Ski Guide launched this morning and is a fully native tablet edition that blew me away because it comes from a company that has recently launched a series of news apps through a third party vendor, Spreed – and has, until now, not exhibited much ambition when it comes to the tablet platform

One assumes that The Denver Post produces a ski guide every year. The paper's website shows that this year's guide hit the website on the 18th of this month.

Special sections like this one can have a number of different business models: they can be ad supported;  single sponsored; or the editorial itself can be paid for by the ski resorts included in the guide.

This one has me baffled and I have put a call into the editor to find out exactly what model is being used here because I do not see any advertising, and while some of the articles come from freelancers (which is what you would expect from an advertorial section) most comes from staffers.

Since the tablet edition of the Denver Post Colorado Ski Guide is free of charge, then the only business model left would be if the resorts paid to be included. This is an important question because so far I have yet to see any evidence that the Digital First parent company has a clue as to viable business models involving digital – despite their name. In fact, at least one of their editorial advisors has been famously against all things iPad and all things Apple.

My guess is that this is strictly an editorial product, produced simply because skiing is important to the area and its readers. The fact that there is no advertising here, or even a single sponsor would be shocking if it were not for the fact that I continue to see newspapers fail to understand the business potential of the new digital platforms.
As for the tablet edition itself, it is a winner – by far the best thing I've seen out of MediaNews Group or the Journal Register Company (which make up Digital First Media).

The layouts are simple, but effective - designed specifically for the iPad's display. There is good use of slideshows and other native tablet features. The navigation is smooth and logical, and though the instruction page was slow to load, the rest of the tablet edition flowed and rendered quickly.

The editor the special section is Steve McMillan, and Jeff Neuman is credited with design, as well as graphics (along with Thomas McKay)

The tablet edition weighs in at less than 100 MB, so it is a very quick download, yet still includes plenty of photography and some video. The design is portrait only, which saves file size and helps with the reformatting from print.

The app places the special section inside Apple's Newsstand. All of the Spreed apps are stand-alone apps. Because of this I was a little surprised that a token charge was not assigned to the download (say $1.99, for instance). It is certainly worth it and would break the pattern of free apps and free access to content so typical of the Digital First Media mindset.

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Here is a video walk-through of part of the new special section tablet edition from The Denver Post:

Morning Brief: Mag+ Reviewer updated; the IHT for iPad gets iOS 6 compliance update; NowThis News drops audio opening; Google Voice app adds iPhone 5 support

While the U.S. enjoyed the four day Thanksgiving Day holiday (except those in retail, that is) many developers were busy submitting updates to their media apps. Yesterday afternoon quite a number of those updates hit the App Store.

Mag+ issued an update to its reviewer app to fix a number of bug issues. Here is what the app description has to say:

Many bug fixes and MIB rendering improvements including:
- A layer minimum height properly calculated
- Navigation teeth and bookmark no longer get stuck on screen after using the sharing menu
- Better handling of inline videos
- Transitions on the B layer should no longer stutter or lag

The International Herald Tribune for iPad has been updated to bring the app up to iOS 6 compliance – yes, that seems a bit late to me, too.

The app is similar to the NYT's iPad edition, of course, and the subscription plan's All Digital Access will give you unlimited NYT access, as well. The basic subscription cost to the IHT for iPad is $14.99 per month, though casual readers have access to seven articles per day from the front section of the app free of charge.

NowThis News updated its universal iOS news app to remove the audio that sounds at the opening of the app. Apparently users complained about that feature.

The problem with audio, video and animations that play at the launch of an app is simply that they replay whenever the user returns to the opening or cover. It seems like this is something that could be fixed by Apple so that developers could program their multimedia openings to play once upon opening and not repeat.

Users of Google Voice will want to update their universal iOS app this morning. The app, Google Voice, has been updated to add support for the iPhone 5, and make the app iOS 6 compliant. The app also will require that users be at least up to version 4.3 of iOS, which seems a pretty safe bet.

The Guardian launches a new version of its mobile website designed for smartphones and small tablets

The Guardian today launched a new mobile website for its newspaper that redesigns the mobile experience for readers using smartphones or small tablets. The new mobile experience replaces the standard listing of articles with a more sophisticated look and feel.

"We have rebuilt our mobile site from the ground up, focusing on improving user experience, reliability and download speed," wrote Chris Mulholland on The Guardian's U.K. website. "Our aim is to provide the best user experience for reading our content, whatever your device. The new mobile website is a major first step towards that responsive goal, though it is currently only optimised for smaller screens: smartphones and tablets up to seven inches. If you view the site on an iPad or anything larger, you will still see the desktop site."

The new website features responsive design and is optimized specifically for seven-inch displays, though it scales down for use on any size screen.

"Rather than release a site with every feature built, you'll find this site will continue to grow and evolve. We've released beta versions of this site early and will continue to push out updates often to continue to test and improve it," Mulholland wrote.

McGraw-Hill to sell its education business to Apollo Global Management, rename itself McGraw Hill Financial

Back in the early nineties I was recruited to McGraw-Hill to run a trade publication. My own impression of McGraw-Hill was that it was a publishing giant, but I was wrong – the company, instead, saw itself as a financial services company burdened by a portfolio of publishing titles. Slowly the company has transformed itself by selling off much of its portfolio including BusinessWeek, and today its education division.

Today McGraw-Hill announced that it had sold off its McGraw-Hill Education business to investment funds affiliated with the private equity company Apollo Global Management, LLC. The sales price is $2.5 billion.

"After carefully considering all of the options for creating shareholder value, the McGraw-Hill Board of Directors concluded that this agreement generates the best value and certainty for our shareholders and will most favorably position the world-class assets of McGraw-Hill Education for long-term success," said Harold McGraw III.

The sale will now allow McGraw-Hill to rebrand itself as McGraw-Hill Financial with expected revenues of $4.4 billion annually. Total revenue for 2011 was $6.246 billion. The company's leading brand names will be Standard & Poor's, Platts and J.D. Power and Associates.

The company still has some divisions that will be hanging on including McGraw-Hill Construction which includes the Dodge products, Sweets, Engineering News-Record and Architectural Record. This is the division I worked for back in the early nineties. One could visualize the company retaining this division as part of its financial services repositioning, though a sale to another PE is not out the question either (and has been expected by some observers).

McGraw-Hill has been a major player in the education market – both in pre-K to 12 and in higher education. But the textbook field is in transition to digital media and McGraw-Hill has been slow to adjust, and in fact has lagged behind many other media companies in this regard.

1100 Media releases tablet edition for Scottsdale Magazine, reformatting editorial pages for the iPad

My minimum expectation of any self-respecting art director is that they would insist that any digital editions created would have their editorial pages reformatted for whatever device the reader will eventually use to read the magazine. The argument used would be simple: let's makes sure our readers can actually read our new digital editions.

That simple principal is what 1100 Media is using for its new tablet editions. During the Thanksgiving Day holiday the city/regional publisher has released a new tablet edition for Scottsdale Magazine, the twelfth app to be found inside the App Store.

1100 Media is taking a minimalist approach to tablet editions: the new digital magazines look a bit like replicas in that they are portrait-only designs with very little interactivity. There are no scrolling text boxes, no scrolling within stories, etc.

But the content to be found here has been reformatted for the iPad's display, making it easy to read without resorting to pinch-to-zoom. A few interactive tricks are employed, such as slideshows, and in on one case a cute little animation/video.

It works. That is the important thing. It works.
It's fun to flip through some digital magazines that employ all the bells and whistles that the platform can offer an adventurous art director or developer, but this approach is not right for every magazine and every publisher.

Scottsdale Magazine is a free download inside the Apple Newsstand, and individual issues and subscriptions are available free of charge, as well.

Morning Brief: Media grapple with Catalan vote meaning; Cyber Monday deals push tablets, other electronics

Catalans went to the polls Sunday in regional elections that had, at its center, the issue of independence from Spain. Political parties that advocated holding a referendum on independence won a majority of seats, though media outlets seems to diverge on the true meaning of the election.

The Guardian, for instance, saw the election as a "blow" to the party of Catalan president Artur Mas, his party losing 12 seats.

But other parties that advocated a referendum on the issue of independence own seats, giving those in favor on independence a majority. "Flying pro-independence flags - a lone star against yellow and red stripes - Catalan voters on Sunday handed 87 seats, almost two-thirds of the local parliament, to four different parties that want a referendum on secession," the Reuters report concludes.

Today is Cyber Monday, the online equivalent of Black Friday, and not surprisingly, Amazon is pushing tablets, offering a discount on its already rock bottom priced Kindle Fire. Shoppers are expected to spend as much as $1.5 billion today online.

Apple, too, is promoting its tablets, though one won't find much in the way of discounted pricing on its website. (Strangely, Apple is promoting free shipping when it normally offeres this online anyways.)

Apple's refurb store is also offering better discounts on older model Macs than other outlets, as well, including Amazon's Cyber Monday section.

Best Buy is discounting Samsun and Asus tablets, though one wonders how they will do with that strategy.