A couple of weeks ago I noted that the phrase “iPod moment” had popped up a couple of times in discussions about newspapers’ futures. As in, What happens when newspapers face their iPod moment? What device or technology will come along that will complete the disruption, the way the iPod basically reinvented the music industry?
I’m wondering if the iPod moment didn’t start today with, well, the iPod.
The iPod Touch is a cool piece of technology. All that coolness doesn’t hide the fact this isn’t just a music player, it’s a mobile, wireless-network-armed link to the ‘net. You can’t send email (or maybe you can, using webmail), but you can surf using a real, full-fledged web browser. There’s even a separate link to You Tube ready to tap. Oh yeah, it plays music, too.
So we have a web-browsing machine — with a very high cool factor — and nearly ubiquitous wireless, much of it free. I can read my morning paper (or any morning paper) on the bus. Watch any of the news channels popping up at YouTube over coffee. Hit Bloglines for my feeds. Log into Facebook to update my status and see what my “friends” are up to.
The iPod moment for newspapers? I’m not entirely sure. I need to think about this a little more, see what the reaction is. (Given that this is basically an iPhone without the phone, the reaction could be a “so what?”.) But if this isn’t the iPod moment, I think we just moved a lot closer to it than we were before this morning.
UPDATE: Between the time I wrote this and the time I hit publish, I was doing some browsing and came across this piece: The iPod moment for newspapers won’t be good news for some parts of the papers. Charles Arthur’ suspects it will come from some form of e-paper, but the capabilities he’s describing sound an awful lot like the internet-connected iPod Steve Jobs unveiled this morning.
TAGS: iPOD, iPOD MOVEMENT, NEWSPAPERS, RETHINKING MEDIA
One of the thoughts I’m wrestling with is that most of my web browsing is interactive — leaving comments, blogging, etc. — and the iPod touch doesn’t look like it’s ideal (or even easy) for that type of “work.” But while there are a lot of folk like me, there are a lot who aren’t.
The thing is: whenever I find myself thinking this isn’t such a big deal, I remember a blog post I wrote some years ago, when the video iPod’s were released, basically blowing off the idea that anyone would want to watch video on a tiny screen.
Like you, I’m still tending toward the idea of larger-sized, flexible e-paper as the eventual doom of much of print, but I’m leaving myself open to surprises. Of course, that surprise could be bad news for publishers: if they “lose” the viewport of the bigger size, they stand to lose considerable ad opportunities.
Coupla quick thoughts: I think that the moment will come both when more-or-less free wireless is as pervasive as cable TV has been since the ’80s (and works under heavy loads!), and those e-paper thingies mature, can present something approaching a tabloid size, and pick up on the wireless. Getting mobile kit in the right size matters. Having read stuff through an iPhone, I find it laborious for anything over a few hundred words. Reading a few grafs without having to _do anything_ is something this iStuff can’t offer. Then, there’s the ability of a big viewport to allow publishers to present material with all the visual hints we expect from print. A small screen — no matter how hi-res — doesn’t affter that.
Second: the amount of fellatio (and playing His Steveness’s game) given to Apple for a bloody product refresh is truly astounding. Five-and-a-half minutes on CTV NewsNet this evening for Pete’s sake! Dvorak is right: the media tends to be a bunch of inveterate Apple-polishers.