On Twitter lately, I’ve been banging on a lot about Rupert Murdoch and the iPad. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to put forward some of my thoughts in a longer format.
If you haven’t been following Rupert’s thoughts on the iPad, here’s a very quick summary. Basically, Murdoch believes that the iPad is a magic and revolutionary device and it (and its media tablet competitors) has the ability to save the newspaper industry from its slow demise.
I think the media tablet genre does have the ability to do this. This is because it takes the experience of consuming content online, on a computer screen, and makes it as relaxing and comfortable as possible. An iPad user could flick their orientation switch to ‘lock’ and lay back in their easy chair or snuggle down in bed, all the while browsing the World Wide Web.
However, just because users can now do this, does not mean that this translates into people suddenly taking up newspaper reading again. The media tablet (of which the iPad is currently the most popular example) is a new medium, and with it comes a new model of consumption. I’ll illustrate what I mean by talking about two applications for the iPad, Press Reader and Flipboard.
Press Reader is a fantastic application for anyone who loves newspapers. Basically most major newspapers from around the world are available to be purchased as a one off or as part of a subscription and downloaded to the iPad on a daily basis.
Once downloaded, a user can read their favourite newspaper from cover to cover as if they were holding the printed edition in their hands. The application brings up articles in a nice reading overlay so even a person with the most precarious eye sight can easily read the newspaper’s text. For those that truly are blind, Press Reader will read out articles with the tap of a button.
The problem is that a newspaper is still a newspaper regardless of whether its been delivered to you rolled up with a plastic sheath on the outside or wirelessly to your media tablet. You have to flick through pages and pages of articles to get to the one you want. (How many times have you had this exact conversation in your life? ‘Oh I saw this interesting article in the paper this morning, I think it was on page 24, let me see if I can find it for you’…’Oh I’m sure it was on page 24 but I can’t find it, hang on I definitely remember it being on the right hand page’…(2 minutes later)…’Oh, here it is, it was on page 16′).
Contrast this to Flipboard. This application offers a very similar approach to Press Reader. It has a table of contents and pages of articles that a user can flick through. When they find the one they want, they can click on it to bring it up in a bigger window. The difference for the user is that they’ve essentially chosen the content themselves. Flipboard‘s sections are based on a user’s Facebook account, Twitter account, specific Twitter lists they have created, specific users on Twitter that they find interesting, or other sections of news content curated by Flipboard themselves. These curated sections appear to come mainly from blogs.
Flipboard‘s approach definitely suits the way I (and I imagine a lot of others consumers) would enjoy consuming content on the iPad. Its a relaxed experience of flipping through pages of articles rather than trawling through Twitter feeds or using an RSS reader to keep up with my favourite blogs. Yet at the same time, it’s my content so I’m not get anything I don’t want to see (and if I am, I can quickly remedy it).
Newspapers (and Mr Murdoch) could think about the lessons that the initial success of Flipboard should have shown to them, and either join Flipboard or come up with something similar. For example, I would love to be able to read the national affairs section of The Australian, along with their media coverage. I’m not particularly interested in the business section, although perhaps if there was an article that was to do with the media industry or mentioned an organisation I was interested in, then it would be filtered out for me. Then I’d combine this with the sports section from the Herald Sun.
This would be a way of reading news content online that I approve of, and one that I’d happily pay money for. So hopefully some newspaper proprietors cotton onto this idea of customisation and realise that users probably don’t want to pay for all their content because they’re not interested in reading it all. But they might be interested in some of it, and be quite prepared to pay for it
Customisation and sharing is what makes consuming media content on the web great. The iPad (and other media tablets) makes this experience more pleasurable, and more natural by largely bringing back the experience of reading. App stores make it easy to purchase content on these devices.
This idea then, of a customised newspaper that might take content from a number of titles within a stable or even titles from a number of different media proprietors doesn’t seem all that remarkable. It is surely only greed, in that proprietors like Rupert Murdoch think they can make people buy an entire newspaper online , that is stopping them from exploring this idea further.
