The buzz in the industry is that Fairfax Media is about to launch its much promised “native” iPad apps for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — possibly before the end of this month.
Those who have seen the product say it is good, and the competition at News Limited acknowledges that it expects it to be better than the app presently in use at The Australian, or anything else on the Australian market so far.
But what difference will it make to the economics? One of the quickest reverses in media thinking has occurred over the past six months. Just last November, media executives from News Limited and Fairfax were proclaiming iPads as the saviours of the newspaper business model.
People would be prepared to pay for news content delivered to the “cool new toy”, they said. Advertisers would pay a premium. The problem of collapsing business models would be solved.
Well, nobody is saying that now. The rumble in the industry is that subscriptions to the existing iPad apps are underwhelming. People signed up to the free trial offers, but most did not return. This echoes the experience in the US.
Mobile devices are obviously important, and news organisations have to deliver to them. But they are not saviours. They alter little about the underlying problems.
The figures on usage also suggest that people are not using iPads primarily to consume video and news content on the move, as expected, but rather as a leisure device in the evenings, while watching television or reading in bed.
As News Corporation’s chief digital officer, Jon Miller, said at the launch of The Daily in New York, on the iPad news organisations have to compete not only against each other, but also against Angry Birds.
Meanwhile, News Limited editors are saying that they are reorganising their news operations around the idea of having different versions of their mastheads on different platforms.
The concept was described by the editor of The Courier Mail, Michael Crutcher, at an event where I was also speaking at the Queensland University of Technology last Friday.
Crutcher told the gathering that The Courier Mail newsroom would soon be reorganised with desk editors overseeing areas of speciality, and able to make more decisions about how content was treated.
This was because there would soon be several different Courier Mails, each with different imperatives: the traditional print version, the free website, a website that would be behind a paywall, and an edition for delivery to mobile devices.
Similar thinking — responding to the different ways people use their news services at different times of the week — is behind moves at The Age to have different editors for the weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions.
News Limited has, of course, been promising that paywalls would be erected around part of its content for quite a while now, but we have yet to see it happen.
Crutcher was not able to enlighten us on dates, nor on what kind of content subscribers might be asked to pay for. But News Limited newsrooms are, apparently, ready to move to put up the paywalls at short notice.
It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at the discussions within media organisations about paywalls. The Murdoch experiment in England with The Times and The Sunday Times is, according to some commentators’ back-of-the-envelope calculations, not yet netting sufficient revenue to make up for lost hard copy circulation.
And the more sophisticated New York Times model, which has “porous” walls to allow in social media links and traffic from search engines, is putting out discount offers to drive up numbers.
It is too soon to proclaim either of these experiments a success or a failure.
I read the Age and the Australian on my iPad, but I use Pressreader, which allows me to see the newspapers exactly as printed, so I flip through the pages, read the articles I find interesting and if there are any links provided also look at these too. I found the Australian’s app considerably unimpressive, so I didn’t renew. I imagine the Age’s one will be similar.
The ‘crappiness’ of the existing apps seems to be because the media companies want a lot of control over their apps and content. They use roundabout and complicated methods to display text, graphics and information instead of the native Apple controls, making the whole app experience entirely lacklustre.
For a long while, you could not select text in The Australian’s app, scrolling did not conform to the ‘rubber band’ effect when you got to the end of a block of text, there was excessive and intrusive advertising despite paying for a subscription, and the app did not offer anything above and beyond what you would get for free on the regular website.
They still have a long way to go.
I guess the question I still have, and obviously did not convey it as well as i might have at the discussion on Friday, is that the model of subscription seems flawed in its origin.
1. If there is a decline in numbers of people taking out subscriptions to newspapers daily delivered to your door, why would it make sense to pin hopes on termed subscriptions?
2. This, as you mention, also corresponds to Apps and Ipads. So the persistant rhetoric that if you build it they will come seems a bit flawed.
3. Mobile use seems to favor the pay as you go model, iTunes, kindle, etc where an edition or song can be bought as and when wanted. This does not then mean someone has to buy anything, rather it allows someone to register with a number of providers and pay for what is wanted. In the case of news this might be a days edition rather than a six month edition. Why is this?
4. I am not sure how people use news at the moment but the internet has allowed access to a vast array of information and news sources. Why is it then a good idea to try sell someone one paid one?
5. Just as the rest of the media is trying to work out its audience and directing itself to niche broadcasting, rather than simply one to whomever, newspapers, which have traditionally targeted a niche audience seem to be failing to actually understand theirs.
6. Perhaps people will pay for quality – if so then the quality has to be there. In the UK the quality of news coverage and its extension news/business commentary is driven by competition and innovation from a myriad of different providers. In Australia quality is driven by competition between the two sides of politics and their commentators and is illustrated in its …….”sports reporting”? as quoted.
Newspapers do have the advantage that you don’t have to go hunting for the information, as you do on the Internet. You can take the ‘news’ as presented or ignore it. On the Internet, it’s more of a ‘click and miss’ method. And at least with newspapers, you have an idea what a fair proportion of the rest of the population is seeing.
The Oz on iPad is a good first try, and very cheap. But I’ve since discarded it, not for the quality of the app but the quality of the “journalism”, or is that “opinion” (I can’t tell). Fairfax’s earlier attempts at giving me a huge PDF to scroll around didn’t thrill me.
Love to see a CrikeyPad app! The website works OK, but it would be nice for the site to remember my login *forever*, if I choose.