I am a complete convert. I’m one of the lucky Australian’s who travel to the USA on a reasonably regular basis so I picked up mine in San Francisco a few weeks ago, giving me time now to try the device and explore how it fits into my professional and personal life.

I know we’ve been looking forward to a paperless world since the first personal computers arrived on the scene several decades ago. The opposite is of course the reality – all we’ve done is invent ever increasingly efficient methods to spit yet more reams of dead tree out of ever faster printers and copiers.

Over the past year or two I have been making a concerted effort to reduce the amount of paper on my desk. My adoption of Evernote last year has substantially helped, I now keep all my work notes, documents and other information in this marvellous organiser.

And now with my iPad purchase I’m rallying the paperless troops once more. I’m deliberately not taking a notebook or work papers to meetings. I have everything already in Evernote, and then take notes directly into my iPad during the meeting – which by default has made me the minute taker. Everyone seems quite impressed as I hit the email button at the conclusion of the meeting and send them my notes.

The Australian's iPad app has sold 4,500 copies so far.

I have heard criticism of the iPad keyboard – Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer last week claimed the iPad was “a different form factor PC”. “A guy tried to take notes on one in a meeting with me yesterday – that was fun,” he said. “The meeting didn’t go very fast.”

I’m sorry Steve, you might be vastly richer than I, but you’re just plain wrong. Maybe it’s just a case of being pissed off that Microsoft, despite playing with tablet operating software versions of Windows never truly created a ground-shifting device. Maybe the projected 10 million iPad sales are ramming home to him the missed business opportunity.

My take on the iPad is two-fold:

1. The iPad represents a whole new class of content creation opportunity. It’s easy to use in that particular Apple way (by which I mean, it’s Apple’s way or the highway). There are a myriad of apps already available to help you draw, write, paint, mash up and compose content. Without having to cart around a laptop, and with the 3G service, anywhere at anytime.
2. The iPad represents a whole new class of content delivery opportunity. Oh we’ve done the whole ‘newspapers are dying dinosaurs’ thing, the reality without question is that there will always be printed publications. But the general malaise affecting the old-style news print models will continue as more people choose to source their news and opinion through alternative channels.

The smart publishers are jumping on board the iPad wagon, hoping to ride the coattails. And early mover status probably isn’t a bad thing. It gives you chance to explore models, try variations and consider possibilities whilst the audience is still relatively small, and still learning itself.

I’ve tried a number of ‘news’ apps on my iPad including:

1. The Australian – I think they took a look at the Wall Street Journal when it comes to layout and functionality. But it does the job, signing up was quick and easy, the interface is fine.
2. Wall Street Journal – an ‘early adopter’, they were featured in Steve Jobs’ iPad launch speech earlier this year. Their app is comprehensive and subscription based beyond an initial free period. I find it slightly tedious having to wait for the downloads to occur, but other than that it works well. They’ve sold 10,000 apps on a $US18 a month subscription.
3. Financial Times – it’s a great app, although given their financial markets focus, not so relevant to my daily life. They’ve gone for a similar layout as the WSJ, but with a more fluid scrolling screen, whereas the WSJ (and the Australian) try and contain each page to the dimensions of the iPad screen.
4. Wired Magazine – the leading light, their iPad version of the magazine is a complete delight, audio and video is embedded, the whole magazine layout and content has been re-purposed whilst retaining the distinctive Wire design.
5. BBC – basically a video clip app, allowing you to watch news videos across a range of topics and regions. They don’t update all the time (although you can listen to the BBC world service radio streaming), there are only a few videos in each category. But it’s a slick and effective content delivery mechanism that will improve as they devote more resource to populating the content.

An honourable mention to the Guardian Eyewitness app – not strictly a news application, rather it delivers a single photo each day to your iPad. But what a photo! It’s especially selected as being the particularly thought provoking image of the day from the Guardian’s extensive photo journalism resources.

And a raspberry, well raspberry in waiting anyway, to my home town’s own The Age. I have The Age’s app because it appeared on the app store for a few hours a week or so ago. It’s since disappeared, apparently it was only made available for a short time so the company’s managers and executives could give it a try. I sincerely hope the reason it hasn’t officially been released is because they are working their little geeky butts off completely rewriting the app. It’s woeful. It looks like they simply replicated their iPhone application, right down to the web-based sign up pages. It’s clunky, completely counter-intuitive, and a mess. There, does that make my views plain?

It’s also worth taking a look at some of the RSS feed readers, because several of them aim to mimic the newspaper experience, and a couple do a great job, check out Early Edition or for a lighter, faster experience try Sources.

The iPad represents a brave new world for content creators and consumers. The iPad’s ability to meld a true multi-media experience, in a device that can be used anywhere, combined with its content creation capability, will define a new marketplace, and change others.

Finally, if you were sceptical of the iPad’s ability to do anything, anywhere, I think news that dolphins are using iPads to communicate with humans may force you over from the dark side to see the iPad light.

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Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me in the early 1990s when I was a casual Producer with ABC Radio in a mid-sized Australian coastal country town.

Among other things, each month we would trawl through the local council minutes to try dig up issues and stories for our Morning Program – a 2 hour interview-based talk program that often required me as the Producer to come up with up to 14 unique story leads a day.

I joined this team in the midst of something that turned from a local small town controversy into a full-blown international debate on gay rights, gay tourism and the pink dollar. I wasn’t there for the first news interview that started things off, but joined the week after when a talkback caller came on air and divulged that the planning story we’d done on a guesthouse had way more to it than met the eye. The broadcaster was intrigued and probed for some time until it was established that the caller believed the guesthouse was to cater specifically for the gay market and hey presto we were away. Suddenly this issue was known as the Gay Guesthouse story.

What's your Gay Guest House moment?

The story was duly filed on the news wire by the News Editor and after the show the broadcaster and I sat down and debated what angles we could follow up with in the next day’s program on the Gay Guesthouse story. We decided to chase the applicants and find out more about the guesthouse and what it would really be like. That side of things was easy enough – the applicants were indeed gay, and unofficially their guest house would target market the gay community, but they hastened to add that any paying customer was welcome, they would be no different to any other guesthouse in the area (a new growth industry at the time). They were reluctant but willing to go on the radio.

So far, so mild, but foment was churning beneath the surface along the High Street and pretty soon residents were openly arguing about the Gay Guesthouse in public.

By the way, this Australian coastal country town could in no way be considered a mecca for gay, creative, innovative industries or people at the time. It was a town that had suffered quite harshly during recessions in the late 1980s and again early 1990s and the town’s values were focused around mateship, blokes, fishing and agriculture.

The controversy and open debate on town streets yielded us some great interviews with the Town Mayor, Planning Director, the applicants (who were fantastic radio talent), and gay rights activists from Perth who were aghast at some of the paranoia of our talkback callers. Indeed looking back it was rather extraordinary, there were accusations of children being turned gay and the like by otherwise well-balanced and sensible community members. The really strong players on air in all this were the Mayor – Councillor Annette Knight – a really gifted communicator and progressive and the applicants – who just wanted their business to get off the ground.. It’s kind of lucky that Annette had such advanced communication skills because things were about to get hot and steamy.

Somewhere in the second week of story reporting on the Gay Guesthouse on our little Morning Program with an unaudited listener audience of c 25,000, things really, really hotted up. On arriving at work at 6am, I did as per usual and replayed the answer machine. On it were messages from the BBC in London, CBC in Canada a couple of US news networks, our own 7.30 Report Program on ABCTV, and also from the current affairs programs of all the commercial television networks. Everyone wanted to report the Gay Guesthouse story.

Hitherto internationally unknown and irrelevant Albany, WA was suddenly noticed around the globe because half its residents wanted a Gay Guesthouse, and the other half didn’t. Talk about a tipping point.

Over ensuing days the Mayor and the Presenter did interviews via satellite with all the major international news outlets, our studio offices played host to ABCTV crew and journalists as well as those of the commercial networks – our radio show was filmed and broadcast in the evening news and national current affairs shows. All this was in the days before online (we did have one email account, for the News Editor’s use only). We even had a reporter from the BBC turn up and use the local commercial television station’s gear and our satellite uplink to file his story.

The Gay Guesthouse was international news and we were inundated with interview requests from around Australia and the rest of the world.

So what is the moral here you ask? Well, from our point-of-view the whole story reporting on this issue was both exhilarating and exhausting, but something important happened to our Morning Program. We became known as the only show to listen to in the mornings in our region – the ratings of the commercial rival who had been nearly level with us fell away and my belief is that a whole new audience for talk radio in that town was born. I certainly know that all council staff had our show on every morning from that time on.

How did the story propagate? All our news items were filed on the ABC’s newswire service, which in turn would file our story copy to AAP. Once the Gay Guesthouse story was with AAP it was picked up by Reuters and then went out in their paid newswire service to most of the world’s big news outlets. Usually none of our stories would even get as far as Reuters, but because we had a ‘hot potato’ story this time, we got noticed.

Story propagation today is that much faster, what took two weeks with the Gay Guesthouse story, could take 24 hours or less now. What’s interesting is considering exactly what ‘hot potato’ issues you could write about that could be a Gay Guesthouse story for your blog or website. That issue with seemingly endless angles and perspectives and one that’s guaranteed to get at least half your readers hot under the collar.

For those of you who are interested, the planning permission went ahead and the Gay Guesthouse had strong bookings for its first year of business. Beyond that I hope they’re still powering on and serving their customers.

If you have any ideas you want to share, or have your Gay Guesthouse moments you’d like to air, please have your say. We’d love to hear your story.

Image: Flickr Tracy O

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“We absolutely never imagine doing subscriptions. My belief is that unless you’re selling porn, and especially weird porn, I would not go the subscription route.”

The blogosphere has picked up on Adrianna’s suggestion that the only subscriptions worth selling are for porn sites – I’d love to know what porn she considers ‘weird’.

There’s something of a debate it seems online at present, sparked by the downturn in business of many newspapers, many of whom are struggling financially in a difficult advertising sales market. Of course newspapers rely on advertising, both through the classifieds (once known as ‘rivers of gold’) and display ads. And that advertising is drying up as companies around the world batten down the hatches during the global economic downturn.

I’m enjoying the debate as it rages around the net. Some see this as the end of newspapers. Some believe newspapers can parlay their content to a paid subscription. Others disagree, often violently.

It all takes me back to when we were starting Arts Hub, our paid subscription business, back in 2000. Virtually every ‘expert’ told us we were completely mad, that noone would pay for online content. We totally ignored them. And we’re glad we did, because we survived and almost all of the naysayers are now nowhere to be seen. Their path to riches did not pan out, ours did.

I’ve always said we modelled our subscriptions on the porn business – when we launched in 2000 the majority of subscriptions WERE porn – I think they pretty much invented online credit card transactions, and especially 30 day credit card trials. Along with recurring subs, multi-level memberships etc. All of which we tried to learn from and use in our own (non) porn businesses. Although Fiona did accuse me of doing way too much market research… But it’s easy to see why porn works so well as a subscription – targeted, niched content (think of the infinite multitude of sexual foibles, each their own niche) delivered direct to users when they want.

There’s some good analysis springing from the debate. Although I’d prefer some clarity around just what everyone’s debating. I reckon there are three separate products we’re talking about, yet in general the pundits are simply lumping them together under the paid content banner.

Traditional Newspapers

This one is a no-brainer. As I point out to all and sundry, newspapers have had their day. Their model was fabulous for decades, but the inevitable business cycle has finally curved against them. The weakness in their model has been exposed by the global economic conditions, remove their pillar of advertising revenue and it turns out they are extraordinarily vulnerable. Digital online media hasn’t killed newspapers – newspapers killed newspapers. Like the music industry they spent the 1990s blinkered to the changing world around them. Unlike the music industry, who are endeavouring to defend their archaic business model through aggressive litigation – mostly by suing teenagers for ‘illegally’ downloading Cold Play songs – newspapers are dying with a barely a whimper. Oh there’s a bit of talk about them ‘going paid’ online, but the end is nigh. Don’t get me wrong, there will still be newspapers, but there will be far fewer.

Subscription Content

This is how we made our big money. It’s about delivering content under a paid subscription model, it’s also often described as a membership. Our particular area of interest was jobs and news in the arts and entertainment industry. Subscription content is niched by definition, it’s about delivering content specific to an audience, in the format and context they want, at a time they want. There are numerous examples of successful subscription content businesses online, from industry gossip to stockmarket information. Some of these businesses have been around for many years, our Arts Hub business is still going strong nearly 10 years later, as are contemporaries like crikey.com.au.

Bloggers

I reckon this is the brave new world frontier. Up until now bloggers have almost exclusively earnt a living through advertising, and some via affiliate commissions. But that’s changing. For example the terrifically popular GigaOm has announced a plan to charge $97 a year for premium content.

The rise of blogs over the past five years has seen new celebrities created. People like Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and Perez Hilton and his eponymous perezhilton.com represent completely different ends of the blogging spectrum – one a down to earth practical blog about blogging, the other a purveyor of often slanderous Hollywood A-D List gossip, yet both reach incredible numbers of people, and consequently have terrific advertising potential – and in a way broader than just whacking a bunch of Google Ads on their sites. Their strong connection to their audience, teamed with analytical tools that can distinctively characterize and segment their audience, yields strong opportunities for sponsorships, partnerships and commissions.

And now, as with GigaOm, we’re seeing some prominent bloggers seek to capitalize on the strong audience by creating a subscription product. Not everyone will subscribe, that’s a given, but even a small core of subscribers, with these sites’ scale, represents good revenue opportunity.

I rather like ProBlogger’s almost reverse subscription – the 31 Day Blogging Challenge was free, a kind of subscription-like daily content hit revolving around becoming a better blogger. It was excellent content, and some 13,000 subscribed, for free. And now Darren’s launched a workbook for sale at $19.95. What’s the bet 1,000 of the 13,000 buy the workbook. A great day’s work, and I have no problem with Darren enjoying the fruits of his labour. He works hard and deserves to be rewarded.

Maybe Adrianna was just having an off day, or, as I pointed out in a comment on a blog post, maybe it was one of those off the cuff and ill-conceived comments that slip out of everyone’s mouths from time to time.

Because when it comes to paid subscription content and memberships, porn did show us the way.

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It’s the big story of the day in the media and paid content world, I’m gettting 340+ ’similar stories’ on Google News. Journalism Online’s site says the project will have four activities:

1. A password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.
2. Market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.
3. Negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.
4. Provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue

Opinion appears divided. Indeed, Henry Blodget at Business Insider says someone else tried to get almost the same idea off the ground a year or so ago, but simply didn’t have the same size PR megaphone. This is not encouraging. Valley Wag isn’t impressed either:

“Brill’s only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they’re better off buying overpriced content management “solutions” than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming.”

At the press conference Crovitz trotted out the same old same old examples of paid subscription success: ConsumerReports.org, WSJ.com and FT.com.

I think the key will be the way in which the news items from disparate publications are aggregated and presented. A simple business selling passes to online newspapers isn’t particularly interesting. It’s the contexualization and presentation of the content that will be key.

However, whilst I respect the people behind the project, one cannot help but wonder if this is a strategy akin to herding cats. Whilst media outlets might occasionally profess unanimity in tackling the issues facing the industry, actually getting them all to agree to something is another task again.

PaidContent.org has an interview with Steve Brill.