iPad: Saviour of the newspaper industry?

©Alex Evans 2011

For hundreds of years, the newspaper has been a staple component of the morning routine for millions of people around the world. From businessmen vanishing behind the vast expanse of their broadsheets on the Underground to builders sat in Transit vans trying not to drip brown sauce on page 3, newspapers have for many years, and for millions of people, been absolutely essential.

But perhaps not for much longer. The internet, for all that it’s given us – better communication, cheaper shopping, social networking, has the newspaper squarely in its crosshairs. After all, why spend £1 on a lump of messy paper, half of which you won’t read, when you can pick and choose news content on the internet, free of charge?

Print circulation is in sharp decline. Average net circulation of daily newspapers has dropped 15% in four years, down from 11.5million in May 2007 to 9.8million in May 2011, according to figures published in The Times, Friday July 15 2011.

The same research suggests print costs have risen by 20% in the last year while advertising revenues for, as an example,  The Daily Mail, are down 7% in three months. Meanwhile, the cost of newspapers has risen – The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph have all risen from 70p to £1 in the last four years, while The Times has moved from 65p to £1, The Daily Mail has risen from 45p to 55p and The Financial Times has doubled, from £1 to £2.

It all adds up to a situation in which newspapers are trapped in a self-defeating cycle – the more circulation dwindles, the more prices rise – and the further prices rise, the quicker circulation drops. 

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Daily Telegraph has dropped from 911,454 to 651,184 daily circulation between 2007 and 2011. The Times has dropped from 670,054 to 457,250, while The Guardian has dropped from 384,070 to 279,308. Of these four, only The Daily Mail has seen a small decline (in terms of percentage of overall readership) – from 2,354,028 to 2,136,568. 

The one factor pointed out by analysts most often as the cause of this plunge in readership is the free online news movement.

Newspapers have reacted very differently to this new environment where news is quick, simple and free. The Daily Mail’s website is incredibly successful, pulling in millions of unique users every day, offsetting declining print circulation. But others have fought against it – The Times have locked their content behind a paywall, pushing readers to identify the newspaper’s web output as something worth paying for – with mixed results.

There is, though, one last saviour for traditional print publications: tablet computers, like the iPad. Apple’s hefty slab of screen is the first device which can actually mimic a newspaper exactly. The huge, bright screen lends itself perfectly to presenting full versions of newspaper pages identical to those sitting on newsstands. Indeed, The Times’ iPad app does exactly this – repacking the newspaper every day into a digital edition, complete with turnable pages and, unlike print, added interactivity.

The iPad offers newspapers and magazines a lifeline. A chance to sell their newspaper as a whole, as it was meant to be, complete with rich analysis, opinion and photographs. Never mind web pages with short stories written to gain immediate traffic, the iPad can deliver the deeper newspaper experience in digital format. Crucially – people are willing to pay.

How many people? And will this news revolution turn the whole industry to tablet computers overnight?

Certainly, from talking to newspaper and magazine editors and senior journalists from across the country, there seems to be hope. Hope that the same generation who buy iPods to listen to music, not CDs, the same generation who rent films over the internet rather than buy DVDs, the same generation who want everything with them, everywhere they go, in one device might want to buy newspapers for those devices.

iPad might not kill the newspaper industry – it might just save it.

__________________________________________________________________________

This is the introduction to my University dissertation; for confidentiality reasons I cannot publish any further excerpts, but any feedback is appreciated. This is an update of an earlier article from April, fleshed out after interviews with three major newspapers. All writing ©Alex Evans 2011.

Google Chromebook: The glorious future, not the glorious present

One day, we'll use the internet for absolutely everything. Every TV channel, every phone call, every time we watch a film or write a document, it will be online.

For some, that future could be in four months. That's when the first Chromebooks release; notebooks running Google's new Chrome operating system. It promises to revolutionise computing because every single application, everything it does and everything you do on it is done through the internet.

The advantage is that Chrome has no programs other than its built-in internet explorer. Nothing is running in the background, and it can't install anything, either. That means no viruses, and no bulky, slow anti-virus software, no hard drive, nothing. It can do pretty much whatever a normal notebook can - but it does it all via the web. It's proper 'cloud' computing.

As long as you're on Wi-fi, you can create a Google text document (no Microsoft Word here) then save it online, while playing your music collection on an internet-based music player using files from your online storage.

Here's Google's video, summing up exactly what the new OS offers:

Google's slogan is 'Ready when you are'. Thing is, when on earth will that be?

While most of America and Asia enjoys speeds of between 10MB/s and 100MB/s, much of the UK still runs at very poor broadband speeds - think 1-4MB. Imagine trying to stream a film, work on several word documents and browse the internet while Twitter is open in the background. Normally, a bad internet connection would struggle with that. But when the computer's every thought has to be piped down the internet and back every second, the wireless router will just explode at anything under 5MB/s. Unluckily for us, that's what most of the UK has.

Even if you have a good internet connetion, there's the problem of being out of Wi-fi range - and it's not just a problem for us Brits. Most computers are badly hindered by not having an internet connection, but at least you can work on documents and access your own music, video and photo collections. With a Chromebook, if you're offline, you've got nothing but an expensive paperweight.

Wi-fi hotspot coverage is improving all the time, of course. But it's still nowhere near what it needs to be to make a Chromebook anything approaching convenient.

Chromebook is undoubtedly a brilliant idea. It takes just eight seconds to start up, because it has no programs to load. If you lose it, or break it, well, all your files are online. Just buy another and you won't even notice the transition.

And buying another won't be so painful, either. Prices haven't been announced yet, but because a Chromebook is essentially an internet explorer with a Wi-fi card and a screen, they are going to be much, much cheaper than normal notebooks.

That means Chromebook could eat into Windows' marketshare quickly. If it's half the price, twice as fast and does everything a normal laptop can do, why wouldn't it take off?

Yup, it’s internet speed. It's a shame - and shameful - that the UK has such poor internet speeds. It lags far, far behind the rest of the world. But even in America, fast internet is nowhere near universal, and even if it was, Wi-fi hotspots aren't. And Chromebook's 100% dependence on them outside of the house makes it awkward, at best, to take on the road in 2011.

Chromebook is the future. Years down the line, it will be probably be how computing works, not just on notebooks but on phones, games consoles and TVs. But not yet. Not until internet companies and governments – especially in the UK- catch up with Google's ambition.

Can we trust the internet with a credit card?

If a supposedly secure, world-wide service can be hacked, should we really be shopping online at all?


Somebody 'may' have got hold of 70 million peoples' credit card details this week, according to Sony.

Yes, the Playstation Network (PSN), which allows millions of PS3 and PSP owners to play games online has been hacked, causing the service to be suspended for over a week, but more worryingly, for the card numbers, date of birth, email and physical addresses of all of its users to potentially be compromised.

If PSN can be hacked, and card details (like mine) obtained, then what about other websites? Amazon is completely secure. It displays that little gold padlock in the corner when you buy something. So does Paypal, and eBay, and Play.com. I've used all these sites and never have I received a phone call from my bank asking why I've started bulk buying iPods and Bulgarian porn. But the risk remains.

I must stress that these sites are secure, and I have heard no reports of them being hacked. But it could happen, theoretically. If PSN, a 70-million user service from a world-recognised corporation, can be hacked open, why not one of these sites? If there is even a slight risk, why shop online at all?

Well, some don't. And they aren't all old fogeys who don't know what an internet is. My 18-year-old brother refuses to shop online because he doesn't trust a computer to feed his money digits down a webpipe to some company in the hope he'll receive something in the post four days later. There are plenty who feel the same way.

But we've come a long way since the early days of the internet. The fact is, there is virtually no risk at all in buying from a reputable, recognised website. The level of security is beyond military standard. People's lives are one thing, but if there is money involved, the security goes up to another level.

Yes, PSN was supposed to be that secure, and it might have been compromised. That's a huge error on Sony's part. But games console networks are in their infancy. The Playstation 2 didn't have any sort of network, and the PS3 has only had one for five years. Now that it has happened, future games consoles will be doubly or triply secure.

Sites like eBay and Amazon have years of security experience behind them. If we can't trust them now, we probably never can.

So, can we trust them now? Well, it's up to individuals to determine if it's worth that risk. In my eyes, I take a larger risk of having my card details stolen every time I leave the house than I do when I shop online. Shopping on Amazon is the equivalent of using the cash machine with an army of fifty bodyguards by your side. Out on the street, I'm a scrawny white bloke who couldn't fight a paper receipt, let alone a paper bag or a mugger.

But it is up to the companies who run these websites to persuade people how safe they really are, though. Sony has a lot of damage control to do, and if peoples' accounts do start emptying, it could set web shopping trust back years.

If Sony is the weak link that ruins internet shopping for the rest of us, then it will have a lot more to worry about than the Playstation Network.

Internet shopping should be treated with a heavy dose of caution, but it's as safe as anything else in life: 99%. Nothing can ever be totally safe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to wait for a possible phone call about some Bulgarian videos.