Note to Age editor Paul Ramadge. Don’t give up your day job as newspaper editor. A television presenter you are not.

But that’s one of the few nasty remarks I have to make about the new Fairfax iPad apps, launched today for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Ramadge’s video address to the reader is the only thing about them that can be described as clunky.

Otherwise, it is hard not to agree with the assessment of one user/reviewer on the iTunes app store: finally Australia has a news media app that isn’t embarrassing.

The apps load fast, are easy to navigate, look good — with nice photo galleries and good video — and are a credible alternative to the print edition of the paper. They are a big step ahead of anything else on the Australian media market. Fairfax has taken a long while to get to this point, but it has arrived a leapfrog ahead of the opposition.

The Fairfax blurbs indicate that these are the first of a number of innovations, and that’s good. Clearly, the whole issue of demarcation between what you have to pay for online and what you can get by subscribing to the app has been thought through, and we can expect pay walls to descend on the Fairfax web pages at about the same time that the app ceases to be free at the end of the year.

In the future, you will have to pay $8.99 a month for the app subscription.

Once the pay wall goes up, we can expect other packages of content, tightly targeted to niche audiences, both online and in app. News Limited has similar plans.

I have expressed doubts before about whether any app or cool new toy, no matter how good, will fix the problems with the business model of established media. But although those doubts remain, it is also the case that if the launch standard is maintained, the Fairfax apps will probably be worth the price to the user.

Fairfax is also trialling a completely different “premium” approach to advertising. There are no banner ads, but there are pop up pages dominated, at present, by launch partner Telstra. I understand that the model here will be premium space — only one kind of each advertiser, (one airline, one phone company and so on), with the real estate being charged out at premium prices rather than the peanuts that advertisers pay on the web.

Oddly, not all the newspaper content is there. In particular, there is no crossword, and the link to Sudoku triggers a message saying that there isn’t any yet. Presumably it’s coming later. More surprisingly, there is no Technology section.

On the other hand, stories that look ordinary in the print edition spring to life, with video and  bright photos. The story, in both the Age and the SMH, about cattle slaughter in Indonesia, for example, packs a wallop in the app version that the print version can’t match, thanks to the shocking video.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a rolling series on that city’s criminal history, written by Bob Bottom and Michael Duffy, that benefits from the new means of delivery. The photographers come into their own with pretty galleries of images, including of the home cities, and of Tony Abbott. Budgy smugglers at your fingertips, so to speak.

But this raises an uncomfortable question. (No, not that one). Staff photographers are in short supply. Redundancies have hit hard in the pictorial departments of our major news organizations. Print Reporters, too, are thinner on the ground than they used to be. So can the quality of content be maintained, or is this launch the high water mark before, to quote an unfortunate metaphor in Ramadge’s video, we all disappear over the precipice of change?

On an optimistic note, you can see versions of Good Weekend magazine and sections like Domain that look better than the print iterations. Indeed, the whole experience of the apps is well suited to magazine delivery — which bodes well for the future of that form, at least.

One of the problems with digital news delivery in the past has been the replication of the feel a reader gets from flipping through a hard copy newspaper. Online, many readers miss the exercise of an editorial intelligence guiding them to that which is most important.

The Fairfax apps do their best with this. It is not the same. The experience of flipping through the pages in the app is not as clearly the product of curatorship as it is with a print edition. But just because it is different doesn’t necessarily mean it is worse. I suspect I will get used to it. There are also sections tagged as the editor’s choice, which for me seem a bit redundant, but some might like them.

On the other hand, opinion pages, and in particular letters to the editor and the Leader, look lame in this format, without interactivity. Where is the comments box, the Tweetup, the capacity to disagree? Why would you read this, rather than The Drum over at the ABC or any of a dozen quality blogs available for free?

The old notion of a magisterial institutional voice, represented by the day’s editorial, just doesn’t cut it anymore in my opinion. Not because the writing isn’t good, or the opinion well informed. It is. But these days opinion is all about interchange and argument, not wisdom from on high.

There is no capacity for readers to interact with the news stories either — not even by leaving comments, although that capacity is apparently on the way, according to the in App instruction manual. There is the ability to post to Twitter and Facebook from the app, and some journos have their Twitter names at the foot of the article.

But the core is still a one too many model, not an interactive model.

Nor is there any sign of using the app as a platform for engaging audience participation in serving up news and information about, for example, the state of play on the train service, or all those other stories on which the collective audience knowledge is greater than that of any reporter. Witness what the ABC did here during the Queensland floods, with its crowd sourced online mapping tool.

So there is still plenty of room to evolve. But having said that, this app is a big leap forward.

Will it work? Will it save journalism as we have known it? Who knows. But Fairfax are giving it their best shot, and a pretty good shot it is too.

Good to see the company doing something right.