(This essay originally appeared on the RTDNA website.)
How would you like to reach a brand new audience of two million people and counting?
That’s what I thought.
The development and production of the iPad gives TV, radio and websites a whole new way to publish their material. You can now be a newspaper or magazine, and you can do it with your existing content. Best of all, there is only an incremental cost associated with becoming a “virtual paper.” And in many markets, you can beat the local paper to the punch.
We’re starting to see the first magazines show up on the iPad. WIRED has a version, and Popular Science is coming out with one as well. However, these largely miss the point of the iPad. With the iPad, we can deliver continuous news. Who wants to pay $5 for a digital magazine with ads — a magazine that will be dated immediately?
Let us recall that the reason magazines are published monthly is because it can take that long to produce and ship an edition. Not so with a digital magazine. If I’m going to pay for one, it better update me all day for a month.
You’re going to start to see newspapers migrate to the iPad and other tablet computers. The experience is very good (and it will get better). But we can outdo everyone, including the local newspapers.
Your newsroom has information arriving all day. You publish it on the web. Why not turn that into a digital paper? Get a nice bit of programming that will incorporate your video and you’ll even have an offering that beats the local papers.
Best of all, you can publish all day long. Have constant updates. Enable “push” breaking news alerts (although you should only use these sparingly). Then, three times a day, publish a “finished news” version of your “paper.” You should have one for the morning commute, one for the evening commute and one for late night. Imagine – a return to the evening newspaper!
Then you can get into the magazine business. You publish evergreen stories several times a week. Save the best, and publish a monthly magazine that shows off your chops.
People aren’t going to download a new app every time there’s a new edition of your newspaper or magazine, so make sure your app pushes the latest editions.
Then give the thing away.
I know – you’re thinking “this is the mistake news made with the web.” Only that’s not really so. The mistake was trying to sell advertising the old-fashioned way. Soon, you’ll be able to sell geo-located ads that are local to where the reader is at that moment. You want to be prepared for this. Those ads will be a lot more valuable – and you’ll be able to sell them for more.
Apple has sold two million iPads in two months. More tablets are on the way. Are you prepared to be a local news provider for this new platform? Are you ready to get seriously disruptive and out-newspaper the newspapers?
You can do it.