Just when you thought the web was the unassailable media platform of the 21st century, it is cut down by that killer app from the 18th, ye olde magazine.
Well Chris Anderson to be precise, who argues in Wired that applications have supplanted the web. Strangely, Anderson makes his case for apps below a chart headlining video as the internet’s single biggest growth area for traffic (51% of all US internet traffic, to be precise).
But taking Anderson’s argument face on, where does the rise of the app leave the news business, the flatulent Rottweiler in the dog shelter of online content? Can apps give it a caring home at last?
The web is already a winner-takes-all environment with Facebook its portal, and Google its yellow pages. Journalism failed to take its chance in the information revolution. But now with the move to social and mobile, phones and e-readers, is there a second chance?
Serious news organisations have placed their bets. With Apple selling a million iPads in barely a month, paid iPad applications from the likes of the Times and the Financial Times line up on app stores with free offerings from the BBC and Thomson Reuters.
But already there are signs that native newsreaders like Flipboard for the iPad and LeNewz for the iPhone are stealing a march on the standalone offerings of news providers. Numbers may still be modest but design, usability and social integration all place them well ahead of individual apps. Flipboard (my own app of choice) visualises the content of links shared on social networks. In other words, it builds a newspaper out of things you know other people are reading because they are sharing them — every editor’s nightmare.
But news executives have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. In June, the New York Times responded to the challenge of one newsreader app, Pulse News, by asking Apple to remove it from the iPad App Store.
Pulse bounced back in days, but then the company behind it, Alphonso Labs, is unencumbered by the legacy costs that go with producing a daily newspaper.
Let’s be clear. Applications exist because of the current limitations of mobile devices. Developers will likely out-develop news organisations. And the device distributors will keep the change. Apple takes 30% of any iPhone or iPad paid application sold on its App Store. That figure looks modest next to the 65% of subscription money that publishers hand over to Amazon for distribution on its Kindle e-reader.
The Wall Street Journal gets round Apple’s cut by offering its iPad service free to subscribers (who have to pay elsewhere). People magazine has just concluded a similar arrangement and other US magazines are expected to follow.
But such deft tricks fool no one. The value that news organisations used to get from owning their distribution and having advertising monopolies is not about to be recaptured by apps. And any savings from dropping paper products for digital aren’t about to be brought back either. Migrating print subscribers to digital might save on postage, but that’s where the story currently ends.
Journalism is not about to be rescued by apps, not even Wired with its 70 000 iPad readers. But there is a technological revolution under way that could benefit those who can afford to give away the next generation of e-readers.
After all, a savvy combination of subsidised technology, subscription deals and exclusive sports content launched Britain’s satellite TV monopoly.
But right now there is only one electronic device that can genuinely be said to support a news organisation. It has two large screens, its own keyboard layout and it takes a fortnight to learn to use properly. It’s called a Bloomberg terminal. – guardian.co.uk