What if Apple’s tablet hurts newspapers and magazines
A lot of people in the media are hoping that Apple’s soon-to-be released tablet device (iSlate? iSaviour?) will save the newspaper and magazine biz.
As someone in the industry I can understand why it’s easy to think like this. Apple’s introduction of iTunes gave the music industry something to cling to. It hasn’t stopped illegal downloading but it did give the market a much needed source of new revenue.
The hope is that Apple will start introducing digital subscriptions and single issue sales in the iTunes store. Want that Sunday New York Times? Buy a iSlate edition for $5, download it and away you go. Want a hit of travel journalism? Click and you’ve got National Geographic on your tablet.
Rupert Murdoch thinks tablet devices are going to save journalism. Allowing people to pay for subscriptions instead of stealing all that precious, precious news.
There are a few problems with this model:
1) It’s hedging your bets
Slate’s Jack Shafer thinks that old media companies will get skittish about e-readers once they realize that a $5 e-subscription to a mag may actually be cannibalizing their traditional sales:
As Boczkowski writes, even when established media companies attempt to innovate into a new media space, they end up hedging—not throwing enough energy into new media because they’re too invested in the legacy media. Hedging isn’t stupid. It makes sense to hedge as long as your legacy product remains profitable. But hedge too long and you miss making a profitable and timely transition to the new media form (example: the music business). The book industry, once aroused by the e-market, is now having second thoughts and hedging: Hachette, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, and HarperCollins have all delayed the e-publication of some new titles to better protect their paper versions.
Keep in mind that Apple will likely take a cut of any subscription or sales on iTunes (if apps are a good benchmark, that figure will be about 50%). There’s also the fact thatads in digital editions, if they even have any advertising, won’t be netting the publications as much as their dead tree equivalent.
2) They’re not thinking differently enough
Shafer touches on this too, but he’s right. Publishers seem to be locked into their original formats. Those making digital editions of magazines think it’s OK to just convert their mags to an electronic version with little or no regard for the differences of electronic reading. Don’t believe me? check out this Sports Illustrated video of a possible tablet version.
A static jpeg of your cover is a lazy way to introduce an electronic issue of your mag. Cover lines on your magazine cover are designed for the newsstand, so why the hell are they on your digital edition? And without links? Don’t even get me started on the silliness of replicating a newspaper’s front page on an e-reader.
3) You’re still selling scarcity
One of the most insightful points in Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do is the idea that Google (and the internet in general) killed the idea of scarcity in advertising. That coveted ad in the A-section of your local paper isn’t so coveted anymore when fewer people are reading your paper AND when can sink your ad budget into targeted online ads.
The business model for tablet editions isn’t quite clear yet but if it mimics traditional ad sales then all they’ll be doing is extending the current failing model.
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