Morning Brief: Al Jazeera to buy Current TV, gaining foothold in U.S. market; Time Warner uses sale as excuse to drop Current and prevent Al Jazeera's appearance

During the Arab spring Al Jazeera English was an indispensable news outlet for those trying to stay informed on events in Egypt and other countries. The problem was that Al Jazeera was mostly missing from the television screens of most Americans.

In February of 2011, for example, TNM reported on the soaring web traffic the Qatar-based network had enjoyed thanks to its coverage. Later in April the network released its first iPad application, again in hopes of reaching Americans hungry for better news coverage of events in the Arab world.

Now the network has made its own news with the acquisition of Current TV, the low rated cable channel founded by former vice president Al Gore. The acquisition and launch of Al Jazeera America will mean that the network will now be available to 40 million U.S. households, where as it reached only 4.7 million households presently.

"For many years, we understood that we could make a positive contribution to the news and information available in and about the United States and what we are announcing today will help us achieve that goal," Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, director general of Al Jazeera, said in a statement.

"By acquiring Current TV, Al Jazeera will significantly expand our existing distribution footprint in the US, as well as increase our newsgathering and reporting efforts in America."

"Current Media was built based on a few key goals: To give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling," Al Gore and partner Joel Hyatt said in their own sale announcement.

"Al Jazeera has the same goals and, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us."

The New York Times is reporting that the deal was valued at $500 million (Al Gore owns 20 percent of the network being sold).

Al Jazeera had bene trying to break into the U.S. market for years but had run into trouble convincing cable networks to carry the channel. Unfortunately, this move may not be enough to guarantee that Al Jazeera will actually reach U.S. TV viewers.

Late yesterday Time Warner used news of the sale to immediately drop Current TV from its offerings saying in a statement that "our agreement with Current will be terminated and we will no longer be carrying the channel."

Let me among the first to say that Time Warner's move calls into question the company's own commitment to its viewers (and I can also say I am glad not to be a customer of the cable company).

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Lee Enterprises this morning released an update to its Post-Dispatch Baseball for iPad. The update brings the app up to iOS 6 compliance.

The app description says "Follow the 2011 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals on their 2012 campaign to repeat their miracle season with the Hall of Fame coverage from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Stltoday."

I suppose it would be a shame to tell the folks at the St. Louis Post Dispatch that the 2012 season is over and their team, the Cardinals, did not successfully defend their title – though I think there are those at the paper that know this. Maybe they should tell their app development team.

This is a story hidden inside a plain brown paper wrapper to protect those sensitive about certain things

Some time ago I received an email or tweet (I can't remember which) that said that a new sex magazine would be coming to the iPad. My immediate response was to guess that the app wouldn't be something that would go through Apple's app review process. That was confirmed in a later correspondence.

This morning M.G. Siegler and I received word through the same tweet that the aforementioned launch had taken place: SEXt Magazine. (Siegler, as you may know, is a columnist for TechCrunch.)

If you are familiar with HTML5 magazines or apps for the iPad you should be pretty familiar with how this all works: you visit the main website and from there create an app icon for your iPad. Opening up the app then takes you to what looks like a standard magazine app. But in this case, when you press "buy" you won't be going through the Apple iTunes system but whatever system the app producer is using.

SEXt says it is inspired by iPlayboy (the Playboy archive site).  As for the app icon, well, as you can see above, it's well, well...

I can't tell you how the actual digital magazine is, the publisher did not give me a free account so I will leave that up to you to decide (I'm a little poor following the Christmas holiday – or that is my excuse, and I'm sticking to it).

So go ahead and comment here, and remember, you can always post a comment as "Anonymous"!

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While the subject of this particular magazine may be an obvious example of why a publisher would take an HTML5 app approach to publishing to the iPad, there are other reasons why a publisher would go this way, as well.

The first one that comes to mind is in the area of B2B publishing.

The Apple Newsstand is simply not currently friendly to B2B publishers who employ a qualified circulation approach. With qualified circulation, the most important thing is to qualify the reader by having the reader fill out a questionnaire which will determine if they fit the proper profile the magazine is pursuing – construction company executives for one magazine, nurses and doctors for another, for instance.

Apple won't share user data, of course. But the fact is that Apple doesn't have the kind information B2B publishers want, in any case. It's not just the name of the person, or their credit card number, that B2B publisher wants, but their job title, the name of their company, its size and whether the potential reader has the authority to buy or specify the goods and services being advertised inside the magazine.

Another reason to go HTML5 would be create a consistency between platforms. A perfect example would be those magazines that today are producing native tablet designs for the iPad, but producing a replica for Android.

Finally, there is the issues of politics, sex and satire, where Apple sometimes gets things very wrong... or at least wrong for a while.

Media app updates: The New York Times, USA Today and NRP update their major iOS news applications

As predicted, a slew of media app updates have hit the App Store including from some major news outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today and NPR News.

Both the iPhone and iPad apps from The New York Times have been updated this afternoon.

"Visually impaired readers can take full advantage of iOS's Accessibility features, including VoiceOver and AssistiveTouch," the app description for both version states.

The iPhone news app, NYTimes, has the most new features added to the app. Besides bug fixes, the app offers a new search mechanism, and now the Live Blogs, an increasingly important feature of the NYT's website, will update automatically and include photos and videos.

NYTimes for iPad limits the update to bug fixes and the accessibility features (both apps make changes to speed purchasing a subscription, as well).

USA TODAY for iPad has been updated today, though one suspects that bigger changes will be coming.

The update today fixes an issue that causes the daily crossword puzzle to be delayed.

But the big changes is in the layout of the stories which the app description says "improves readability and content organization."

But most observers think that the biggest changes will come later this year when Gannett starts to move the paper's digital efforts to a pay model. Currently the newspaper's apps are free and without any revenue model beyond the modest amount of advertising found inside them.

Because of this, the iPad app is currently a stand-alone app, outside of the Apple Newsstand. Look for that to change at some point.

Also released today is an app update to the NPR News mobile app. The update is very much over due as it brings the app to iOS 6 compliance and adds support for the iPhone 5's larger screen.

But the app also has many more updated features such as the ability to enlarge the fonts, a pull-down refresh mechanism, and the addition of Bluetooth, USB and AirPlay connections.

"Connect to any of these types of devices and hear the audio while seeing related text and images," the app description reads.

The first batch of new tablet magazines for 2013 begin to appear in the Apple Newsstand

It's the New Year, and with Apple reopening its developer site and iTunes Connect, new tablet editions have begun to appear inside the Newsstand. As one would expect, the new releases are a mixed assortment of replica editions, as well as simple and more complex native tablet magazines.

One might think that a magazine called iPad Life would be one of the new natively designed digital magazines. But, no, the German publisher falkemedia has a sense of irony: releasing an iPad edition about the iPad in a replica edition of the print magazine. Sometimes you just can't make these things up.

The replica is also a universal app so you can read the print edition of the magazine about tablets on your iPhone. Whew.

The new app for Angie's List Magazine is quite a bit better. It is a very simply designed digital edition with pages that look like they might be a replica edition, but have the fonts and layouts reformatted for easier reading on the tablet.

The magazine is free inside the new app, though I don't know if this is to let readers preview the magazine before charging, or a permanent decision.

One magazine that is a bit of a mystery is Beautiful Design Made Simple. The app description is minimal, to say the least – and only one screenshot appears, as well, Maybe the release of the app into the Newsstand caught its publisher by surprise.

The app is still downloading the premiere issue of the digital magazine and probably will be for a while – it is going that slowly – so maybe I can return to this one later.

Another magazine released into the Newsstand is from Canadian Claude Barnes, Energy Works Magazine. This digital magazine is probably the best of the bunch and features a more professionally written app description.

The new magazine will require the reader to pay $3.99 for single issues, or $19.99 for an annual subscription, but there is a preview available inside the app that will give the reader a good idea of what to expect.

The short walk-through video gives you an idea, as well:

Hearst Magazines claims 'nearly' 800,000 paid monthly digital subscribers, though tablet edition pay policy for current print readers may skew the numbers

In a New Year letter to Hearst Magazine employees, David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, claimed that the division had "nearly 800,000 monthly digital subscriptions in the U.S. across iPads, NOOKs, Kindle Fires and Android devices—the highest in the industry." Carey also said that after 24 months of investment their digital subscriptions were generating a profit.

Another claim, though, seems odd: that more than 80 percent of Hearst's digital subscribers were "new to our files." This would be hard to support knowing that Apple is not sharing user data with the publisher.

But most importantly, the claim runs up against their own digital subscription policies which require even print readers to pay again if they want to access their magazines digitally. The policy has made Hearst Magazines some of the lowest rated media apps in the App Store.

The total circulation claim, however, seems about right. By forcing print readers who have purchased an iPad to pay again, the publisher is essentially forcing readers to make a choice, and driving them towards their digital products and away from print.

In August the ABC reported first half circulation numbers for magazine publishers and, in general, Hearst showed mediocre results with magazines such as Cosmopolitan showing a small decrease in overall paid circulation. The results for the second half of 2012 will not be released for a few months and we will then be able to see what effect tablet magazines may have had on overall performance.

(My biggest complaint with Hearst's subscription policy is not so much that they are making readers pay for digital, but that they seem so oblivious to the concerns of their customers as exemplified by their tone deaf app descriptions that neither explain their policy, nor tell digital device owners what to expect in their numerous app updates.)

Nonetheless, it is obvious that Hearst is continuing to see its future in digital media.

"The company’s digital leadership team is working on plans to “future-proof” our digital business models for a world where more than 50 percent of our traffic will be on small screens, and our readers will demand fresh, high-quality content from our brands around the clock," Carey said in the employee letter.

Morning Brief: Stock markets rally as Congress passes 'Fiscal Cliff' tax bill; CBS Interactive issues updates to its CBS News iOS apps to fix Facebook sharing bug

In the end the 'Fiscal Cliff' was about as anti-climatic as the Orange Bowl, with the predicted results occurring, and no one really left satisfied. The House late on New Year's Day passed the bill sent over by the Senate which will raise taxes on households earning over $450,000, reinstating the payroll tax to 6.2 percent, and leaving more than enough contentious issues left to occupy the cable news networks for much of 2013.

But investors liked the idea of less Wolf Blitzer and Grover Norquist on their TV screens and as a result stock futures in the U.S. rose, with companies like Apple up sharply in pre-market trading.

In Europe stocks were up with the FTSE rising above the 6,000 mark for the first time since the summer of 2011.

The New Year means it will be back to business for most digital media pros, with Apple's iTunes Connect again available. Apps released just before the holiday in need of an update can now be fixed, and developers will once again be able to check their sales statistics.

A trickle of app updates have already been seen, with doubtless many more to be released later today and throughout the week.

CBS Interactive News updated both its CBS News iPhone and iPad apps this morning, fixing a bug that was effecting Facebook sharing.

So far at least Apple has made no additional changes to its App Store design, with the same holiday section appearing in the Newsstand category. That will most likely be replaced this week and the question is whether the ability to see the most recently released apps will be restored or whether Apple will continue to only let its own selected apps be seen by iTunes users.