What iPads and tablets mean for newspapers
May 18, 2010 by marek.miller
During the opening speech of the Oxford Tablet Summit Juan Senor and Juan Antonio Giner from Innovation Media Group explained the necessity for newsmedia companies of taking tablets into consideration in their expansion strategies. Read about the future of newspapers and the newspapers of the future in the following post.
Many people think tablets are a savior to the newspapers. But publishers should think about the reality. And they are facing few options nowadays:
- exit the market
- be sold or taken over
- cut cut cut until the cow bleeds to death
- re-invent the business focusing on ‘profit audiences’
The only chance to survive? It is the last option of the above.
Paper will stay, it will never die. But the business model and content proposition has changed. When you look at the history of media no meia has ever replaced the other media. Cinema did not kill television, the tv did not kill the radio. Internet is not going to kill the newspaper.
Juan Senor sugests newsmedia focus on their SOUL, understood as:
- Sensuality (i Pad has to be full of sensuality, you will not survive with poor pictures or infographics)
- Omnipresence (you have got to be where your audience is. you have got to be on every platform)
- Unique – it is difficult to stand out in the crowd, but it’s necessary
- Light – the greatest competitor is time (lack of it). We have to be very quick, offer reader a real time saving proposition in terms of content.
The news business needs reinvention. Just like circus died in late 1960’s and was reinvented as cirque de soleil. Newspapers will survive if the publishers re-invent their titles but they will die if they re-purpose only.
Newsrooms have to reinvent the way they tell stories. It is about journalism, not about the platform. When Apple is here, or any other platform, publishers should also be there. The newspaper has to be reinvented by being deconstructied.
Tablets bring a new grammar for new medium. It’s no longer the headline, introduction and text only. These are news you can read, watch and touch. It’s a great challenge how to get people to play with our content.
Experience on tablets is much more important than the product itself.
First tips:
- iPad is not a pdf reader! Nobody will make money out of pdf’s. It’s retro-fitted: you have to open it and scroll through it.
- iPad is not a newspaper on steroids. This is not a cinema or tv business. We tell stories differently. We do have videos from time to time, but it’s not a switch-off-the-business device.
- iPad is not a shovelware – it’s not about putting the website on the iPad.
Should the iPad be more printy or more webby then? Neither printy or webby. It has to be a complete new start. Deconstruction of old medium and reinvention of the product is most important according to Juan Senor.
Tablets have to include premium products. Newsmedia companies should not go free, as they checked it already in the internet and it didn’t work out. The content on the tablets should be charged for from the day one.
When newsmedia companies hire anybody they should think about hiring application developers, at least 1 developer for every 5 journalists. Developers could be in house or outsourced. Journalists together with developers will come up with great ideas while they play more with this platform. It’s important to experiment. Newsrooms should be in the permanent state of beta.
Newspapers on tablets should disaggregate into 3 strands:
- information (like daily news)
- services, like crosswords, sudoku, traffic information. Break down all information you put in the internet for free and charge for it on the iPad.
- share and creaste issues and passions. This should be a special focus.
Strategically publishers have to produce more for those who pay and less for those who don’t.
Publishers have to admit: the biggest mistake they made across the past 50 years was giving their content away for free. Free became very expensive for the publishers. The question with tablets is not to charge or not to charge. The big question is what to charge for?
The who, what, where, and when form is abundant, and unfortunately this is what newspapers are doing today.
How, why, and what’s next model is scarce, and that is a kind of content people are going to pay for. Future newsmedia companies have to adjust to it.
Here is what is potentially scarce:
- original storytelling
- informed comment
- analytical opinion
- exclusive information
- practical recommendations
- local reporting
- editing (brand)
Apple’s goal is to become the world’s kiosk. Publishers shouldn’t however just impulsively bite the apple. If publishers lose customer data and pricing power, there will be nothing left. Own platforms to build subscriptions must be created, some of them will be shown later during the day.
The future of newspapers and websites is different content for different platforms:
paper – long narratives
tablet – depth and experience
mobile – instant news
internet – breaking news, browsing, archives, aggregating, hyperlinking
In other words: paper as premium, tablet as premium, online and mobile as mass medium. People don’t need the same thing on different platform, and expect journalists to become journANALYSTS. Newsmedia companies should move from newspapers to newszines and daily news. And here is how to get there:
- paper vs online is a wrong dichotomy
- digital is the only multimedia
- Cooperation is not integration.
- Integration has to be radical, it doesn’t happen in stages.
Tagged: iPad, Oxford tablet summit, tablets
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[...] for newspapers. Paper will stay, but its business model and content proposition has to change. Newsmedia companies have to focus on the SOUL of their products, what stands for: sensuality, omnipresence, uniqueness and lightness. In order to do so, tablets [...]