Will the iPad save newspapers?Professor Terry Flew

Head of New Media Services Work Program

Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Brisbane21 April 2010

Terry Flew New Media Services and QUT2

The Problem

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The Problem #2

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The challenge: from this …

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to this …

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… to this?

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The iPad as saviour?

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But not everyone is convinced

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How to research this question?

• Limits of quantitative surveys: people will seek “faster horses” i.e. what they have with one identifiable improvement (faster, lighter, cheaper etc.) – tells us little about disruptive innovations

• Issue is not predicting sales (diffusion of innovation curve) or gauging consumer reaction (technology S-curve) – these can be predicted

• Issue is how to gauge what patterns on use are likely to be

• This requires disaggregated qualitative analysis

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Job mapping

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Key research questions

• Which demographics will adopt which use patterns with the iPad - e.g. will people use it to read on the bus or train?

• What other devices are on the horizon – problem of lock-in to single digital mobile devices?

• Relationship between content and masthead (has become blurred in era of Google)

• Relationship to third party apps• Design functionality or user interaction?

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Back to the future?

• Main criticism of iPad (other than lack of a camera!) has been that it promotes read-only rather than read-write

• This can be seen as its strength in publishing, as it re-establishes the world of print in digital space

• Unresolved questions around media/device specificity of news organisations and their internal operating environment

• Don’t start from “Will people pay for it?” – important question, but huge range of “it depends” issues surround it