News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch has stated that the iPad “may well be the saving of the newspaper industry”, by making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience.
If a person only read the Australian newspaper then the constant pro-Apple iPad coverage might convince them that the iPad will be the saviour of publishers and newspapers, a return to the glorious analog past when content was scarce and people were happy to pay a lot of money for it.
However it will a lot take more than the iPad to save publishers and newspapers from their current death spiral of falling revenues and frequent rounds of sacking journalists.
Here are some thoughts from leading thinkers in the area:
Jay Rosen (Respected media critic, teaches journalism at NYU)
Alan Kohler in Business Spectator
Unlike the iPod and the iPhone, the iPad does not look like a revolutionary device, although there’ll no doubt be a (smallish) market for it. And it definitely won’t rescue newspapers.
The big problem for newspaper companies is not that their customers don’t want to read their products on smartphones and laptops: they all have ‘unique browsers’ by the millions – far more readers online in fact than they have reading newspapers.
No – their problem is that advertising revenues have collapsed because online ads are more accountable and there are a lot more of them.
Media is no longer a cartel in which the publishers control the price and tell lies about the effectiveness of the ads. It has become a business with very low barriers to entry and more competition, and now the customers – that is, the advertisers – can measure exactly what they are getting for their money.
The result is that online advertising revenue per unit is, on average, one-tenth of what is in print.
The iPad actually represents a whole new business model. It’s not that it will save the publishing industry in as much as it will transform it utterly. See:
http://www.servantofchaos.com/2010/04/the-ipad-welcomes-the-none-percenters.html