It’s only been a matter of weeks, but the iPad era is off to a roaring start. Sales are amazing – a new iPad is sold every three seconds – and development has been brisk, especially for media content. iPad owners are mesmerized by the gadget, some even swearing they will never buy another laptop again.
“People laugh at me because I have used the phrase “magical” to describe the iPad,” Steve Jobs said recently at the All Things D conference. “But it’s what I really think. You have a much more direct and intimate relationship with the Internet and media, your apps, your content. It’s like some intermediate thing has been removed and stripped away.”
The question for local media, however, is whether the iPad (and similar devices that will start hitting the market soon) will dramatically change the game of audience and revenue. And, if so, how.
Among national media companies, NPR and Wired seem to be making the most impact with their iPad apps. NPR’s app has been downloaded 350,000 times, according to CEO Vivian Schiller. Since about 2 million iPads have been sold, about one in six iPad owners have downloaded the NPR iPad app. The USA Today app, meanwhile, is the highest ranking news app in the free category of the iTunes store (at No. 5). So we know that iPad users are news consumers.
The Wired app has generated headlines – and sales. Some users are enthusiastic about the experience, including staff at the Razorfish Amnesia blog:
“Personally, I think the Wired iPad app is amazing. After seeing the Wired app, the whole iPad thing made a LOT more sense. The iPad (to me) is a reading device. Reading blogs, articles, ebooks, magazines. It’s just so much easier than sitting at a desk or having the MacBook burn my lap on the couch. I’ll be happily throwing $6 a month into Condé Nast’s pockets.”
While others scoff at the notion that this is the future of magazines. International design firm iA provided a full analysis of the layout and design of the Wired app and came to the following conclusion:
No, it’s not. The future is never now. And the future of journalism is definitely not a stack of banners spiced with videos, exported from a paper layout program. You need to try harder.
What is the future of journalism on the iPad, especially local journalism? The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism is hoping to figure it out by engaging iPad users. It’s currently forming the Mid-Missouri iPad User Group that would meet regularly to gather anecdotal information about how people are using their iPads and in particular news apps.
Is this a pure technology play? News, especially video, can be delivered in a more compelling way on the iPad, with or without a news company developing an app. Many iPad users are finding websites in the Safari browser to be every bit as engaging as the proprietary apps.
“Simply browsing the web through Safari appears to seriously challenge publishers’ efforts to create good applications,” international newspaper consultant Frederic Filloux wrote at paidContent. “That could explain why many apps appear stuck in two weird modes. The first one involves encapsulating the web experience into an app, and coming up with a design closer to the original paper. For the second mode, newspapers and magazines choose to replicate the carbon-based reading experience on the iPad with PDF-based reading applications. Not exactly a great leap forward either. But it is convenient: over the last weeks, I found myself buying more newspapers on my iPad than I did on newsstands.”
The bottom line for local media companies, whether in an app or not, is how will use the new platform to reach more audience and connect those users with local merchants through advertising. A paid app might offer an incremental revenue stream, but advertising is going to have to carry the water (again). The Craigslist iPad app (which costs 99 cents) has moved into the top spot among paid apps, so the desire to connect with local content – and a local marketplace – is apparent. The opportunity to create something of value, something people will use, without recreating the newspaper or TV news show experience on the platform will determine whether local media can seize this opportunity. Or fall behind and hope to play catch-up as we have done with the web for 15 years.