AP preparing for more mobile media like iPad

http://www.ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/wn_022610a.html

Wonder how it'll go.

Meanwhile, my newspaper launched a Facebook page ... last month ... and a features writer had to show the online editor how to set up a Facebook page. :'(

 

So ... there' finally an AP for that?

 

Wow... he drove the green and he never felt it hit the club face..

 

I'm sure a workable model will emerge for mobile stuff like this, but I just don't think we're there yet (although it would be nice if we were). Internet ad revenue seems like it's still ridiculously small. Only the biggest of the smallest can use stuff like this to be successful right now, it seems - high profile names that nevertheless have fairly small staffs, who can generate a lot of ad revenue but don't have too much overhead. That said, more media trying and failing is the only way it's going to get it worked out, so I wish the AP the best in their attempts.

As I see it, though, charging for media apps is going to become old hat as soon as a solid platform emerges that a solid chunk of people actually own (and the iPad may be one, but we'll see). Who wants to have an application for each thing they read? Nobody's going to deal with that. What is needed is a single dominant application that allows people to get subscriptions to the periodicals they want to read, and which funnels that subscription revenue directly to the publication while also letting them sell ads and - more importantly - have access to subscriber information so ads can be sold effectively. Hearst's Skiff project claims to be such a device/service, but I don't think they even have a real demo or anything yet, so who knows if that will pan out, either.

Okay, done ranting.

One of my biggest concerns is that I simply don't see my mag making any kind of transition, even if a solid model showed up that would allow publications to stay afloat through primarily online means. 100% of our overall content is about digital content in some form, and probably 50% of it is about new media stuff... and yet our website looks like it just time traveled in from 1997.