A look at how newspapers should tackle the iPad
Posted by Mauricio Longo in General, Publishing on Mar 22nd, 2010 | 0 comments
Digital magazines have been all the talk lately with several of them publishing concept videos of how they will look in a tablet device, in some cases, but mostly on the iPad. Comparatively little has been discussed about how newspapers should tackle Apple’s new device and the promise of a great interactive experience it brings, even though the New York Times was part of the devices unveiling event.
There is ample incentive for newspapers to embrace this new reading experience, not the least of them being the fact that the newspaper business has seen better days, by all informed accounts. It might just be that the New York Times presentation was a bit underwhelming as far as the demo of a revolutionary device goes, which I certainly thought it was. It might just be that it’s been a long time since I had a real life issue of the NYT in front of me, but it just looked too plain and too black and white. I’m not saying that you’d expect your newspaper to resemble a rainbow, but a little bit of color wouldn’t hurt, not to mention a bit of design which doesn’t try to reproduce how papers have looked for over a century.
There are several other papers that are known to be looking into an iPad digital edition in other parts of the world as well as in New York as the Wall Street Journal is said to be working on its own iPad application. De Telegraaf, a newspaper from Holand has published a concept video on YouTube of how it might look like in an iPad. The Danish newspaper Information has published an actual paper edition that shows what it would look like on an iPad.
None of the concepts or applications shown so far look like something that really transforms how you interact with your daily newspaper, so lets give some thought at
what might be different.
Tablet digital editions should be interactive and make tasteful and careful use of color to highlight important information. We’re in the 21st century, starting on its second decade, and people are treating a screen that can show more colors than a human eye can perceive as if it were a printed piece of paper. Please! Give it a rest… 
Digital editions should also walk a fine line between providing too little content and leaving the user unhappy because he needs to go online to get the rest of a story or to see extra pictures and there is no near by hotspot. By the same token they can’t have too much information or you’d be downloading a gigabyte of newspaper data everyday and that would really eat up your shiny new iPad’s 16 GB of storage pretty quick.
With these considerations in mind it is folly to imagine that every advertisement on a digital newspaper will become a video or even an animation when touched. That doesn’t really mean that they need to be still images though, and they could provide additional information about the advertisers and their products, on demand.
As a reader, I would expect that my digital newspaper have all the content I would get in a regular newspaper issue and I would expect it to have additional information available to me as well, if I want to have more background information on a particular story, or if I want to see more pictures. I imagine that I wouldn’t really mind the requirement of an Internet connection if I wanted to look up other articles which aren’t part of today’s edition, but I would certainly be unhappy if there was an option for seeing more pictures from a particular article and it didn’t work because I didn’t have a live connection.
One thing that the NYT seems to have gotten really well was the idea of the readers being able to save particular articles to a personal collection and even having the ability to access that from their phones so they can read the articles at a later time, regardless of where they are. I would go further in suggesting that such a tool should be available on desktop and notebook computers so that if you’re sitting in the office and you need to write a report involving some information you read about in the paper, you can easily look it up and include in your work.
Digital editions also open up more possibilities for citizen journalism, where common people write about what is going on in their localities and in their fields of expertise. While frowned upon by many professional journalists, this type of initiative is being instituted by newspapers around the globe.
Most of the current initiatives are still tentative, and to be fair to the guys at NYT they only had 3 weeks to work on the application before having to show it to the whole world, so we can hope that the final version will be more sophisticated and eye-catching than what we saw on stage during the iPad launch event. I’m sure that we will be seeing a great many other newspapers starting to move in the direction of digital editions as the iPad’s adoption grows and as other competing devices are brought into the market.
What else could newspapers be doing differently to make the most of the iPad?
UPDATE: A very interesting article by Joe Zeff focusing on how newspapers might have opportunity for growth with the iPad was called to my attention by a tweet by Mike Cane.
UPDATE 2: If you are interested in this subject you should probably read an article called iPad Digital Publications Reality check, which complements this one.
*Images: Apple, De Telegraaf, Information (via ipad-review.co.uk)
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