Posts tagged tablets

Khoi Vinh: Magazines Are Failing at the iPad

Digiday interviewed former New York Times design director Khoi Vinh, who has been critical of publishers’ approaches to the iPad. 

How important is the emergence of HTML5 for tablet publishers? Can you see them gravitating towards browser-based experiences over apps as that technology becomes more robust?

There are two strains here. On the tech side, HTML5 is the way of the future. It’s too expensive to publish native apps for iOS, Android and all the different platforms. HTML5 is a much better delivery mechanism for this stuff than a native app. It’s much more affordable and much more portable. On the other side, though, it’s not just about the tech. I had underestimated how effective Apple’s AppStore would be in terms of distributing applications. You can’t beat that, so publishers will have to stay with apps for at least the immediate future.

To date, publishers seem to have focused on simply updating or transposing their print products for use on the device, but are they missing an opportunity in doing so? Should they be rethinking the way they deliver content from the ground up?

Absolutely. I just can’t see the end-to-end magazine format surviving. The Internet lets people consume media in a-la-carte form. To force a package of content on folks is unnatural. Some folks will continue to like the magazine format, but as social distribution becomes the way we discover and receive more of our content, it won’t make sense to sell it in these virtual boxes any more.

What possibilities should publishers be exploring, then?

One glaring omission in the way we package content for tablets is really relevance. Much like when you go to Amazon, they display similar products other people have bought; we don’t have anything nearly as good in realm of publishing. It’s not just recommendations, though. It’s about understanding true relevance. If you look at an app like Flipboard, that’s the one major thing it’s missing. The tech startup that can solve that problem will push forward this area of digital publishing in a big way.

Weigh in with your thoughts on publishers and their tablet strategies.

Technological Innovation: A Publisher’s Dilemma

The news yesterday that newspaper giant Tribune Company is developing a tablet makes me wonder where and how publishers should technologically innovate.

The Tribune plans to offer subscribers free — or highly subsidized — tablets that will reportedly be built by Samsung. Many think the effort is already doomed for failure.

The plan reminds me of a recent Adweek article about the publishing industry’s ongoing woes with Content Management Systems. In it, Erin Griffith catalogues how BusinessWeek spent upwards of $20 million trying to create a social networking layer on top of its proprietary CMS; how Salon.com — which launched in the 90s — is still using the home-rolled CMS it used in the 90s but is reportedly migrating to WordPress; how Time, Inc. has worked on a home-brewed CMS for seven years but will probably abandon it; and how AOL spent three years trying to create a proprietary CMS before ditching the effort, buying Blogsmith for about $5 million and now trying to migrate to the Huffington Post’s highly customized version of Moveable Type.

Griffith writes:

Add a marketplace crowded with content-management options, tight budgets, and a string of media mergers—and the corresponding change in personnel—and the result is that these troublesome tools are being plied in a cultural clusterfuck. The result is a growing number of bloated, tangled CMS platforms reviled by the editors that publish on them, and the IT teams that maintain them.

That’s just the tip of the Content Management iceberg and doesn’t even begin to touch on the difficulties of creating a friction free workflow for multiple platforms (Web, print, mobile, tablet). In hindsight, it’s easy to say publishers shouldn’t have rolled their own. But with foresight does it make sense for Tribune to get into the tablet game?

The short answer is no, but that’s not to say news organizations should ignore in-house technical innovation.

Instead, it’s to ask how and where they should allocate resources in the pursuit of technological innovation. 

Part of the answer is remembering the core product, journalism, and then investing time and resources into technologies that enhance it. 

For example, technologists from the New York Times and ProPublica collaborated to create Document Cloud, a Web-based platform that allows organizations to analyze large data dumps across multiple documents. 

Document Cloud, in turn, uses Open Calais, a Web service developed by Thompson Reuters that layers semantic metadata over content.

These are innovative technological investments in the service of a publishers’ core news and information product.

Meanwhile, Tribune ramains in bankruptcy, is laying off editorial staff and is plowing human and financial capital into a product that will compete with the iPad, Kindle and other market leaders.

From this corner of the Internet, it seems an investment gone wrong. From another corner, Markus Pettersson, head of reader relations and social media at Göteborgs-Posten, writes that Tribune is “afraid, clueless and [has] lost track of what is [its] core product: journalism. It tells everyone including your readers and ad buyers that you have business ADHD, and cannot be relied on to focus on developing your core product: journalism.”

Agreed, and thinking we’ll be writing something very similar to Griffith’s Adweek CMS article a few years down the line. At that point in time, it will be Tribune as the poster boy for tech investment gone wrong.

Some might remember when ESPN tried to create a branded phone. Steve Jobs’ response at the time, “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard.”

ESPN, it’s reported, lost $135 million on the venture.